Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe to Fly Home From Iran, U.K. Lawmaker Says

LONDON — Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian charity employee whose arrest and detention in Tehran since 2016 has roiled relations between Britain and Iran, has been launched and can fly again to Britain, a British lawmaker stated on Wednesday.

“Nazanin is on the airport in Tehran and on her means residence,” stated the lawmaker, Tulip Siddiq, on Twitter.

The detention of Ms. Zaghari-Ratcliffe, and different British nationals in Iran, prompted debate in Britain concerning the nation’s duties towards residents who run into issues overseas, amid accusations by their households that they had been getting used as diplomatic chips in disputes between Britain and Iran, together with over a failed arms deal in 1976.

The most recent transfer additionally got here as American and European negotiators had been edging towards a pact limiting Iran’s nuclear program in trade for lifting financial sanctions on the nation.

Ms. Siddiq, who represents the realm of London the place Ms. Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s household lives and has been deeply concerned in advocating for consideration to her case, had stated on Tuesday that the charity employee had obtained her passport again from Iranian authorities, a small step towards leaving Iran.

The discharge of Ms. Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a venture supervisor for the Thomson Reuters Basis, got here after a long-running marketing campaign of seeming breakthroughs and sudden boundaries to releasing her. She was detained at Tehran’s airport in 2016 on the way in which again to Britain after visiting relations in Iran.

Ms. Zaghari-Ratcliffe was charged with plotting to overthrow the Iranian authorities and sentenced to 5 years in jail, and later moved to accommodate arrest in her household’s residence in Tehran in 2020, in the course of the coronavirus epidemic.

Freedom appeared shut final yr after that sentence got here to an finish and she or he was permitted to cease carrying an ankle tag, however she was as an alternative held on new prices of “propaganda actions,” banned from journey and sentenced to a different yr of detention.

Her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, has denied all of the shifting prices in opposition to her, accusing the Iranian authorities of utilizing her as a diplomatic pawn.

“It’s been clear for a very long time that the Iranian authorities have been concentrating on overseas nationals with spurious nationwide security-related prices to exert diplomatic stress,” stated Sacha Deshmukh, chief government of Amnesty Worldwide U.Ok., after the information that Ms. Zaghari-Ratcliffe had obtained her passport again.

Mr. Ratcliffe has stated that Iranian officers had up to now informed Ms. Zaghari-Ratcliffe that she can be launched as soon as Britain repaid a debt of 400 million kilos, or about $522 million, to Iran associated to the 1976 arms deal. Western international locations, together with the US, have accused Iran of utilizing their residents as leverage over money owed.

Megan Specia contributed reporting from Warsaw.