SULAIMANI (ESTA) — British foreign minister Dominic Raab said it was unacceptable that Iran was pursuing a second case against British-Iranian aid worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.
“It is unacceptable that Iran has chosen to continue the second case against Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe,” Raab said in a statement, according to Reuters.
“She has been put through a cruel and disgraceful ordeal by the calculating behavior of the Iranian government. This must end.”
The British-Iranian aid worker was tried on a new charge of making “propaganda against the system” at Iran’s Revolutionary court on Sunday, Reuters cited her lawyer Hojjat Kermani as saying, one week after she completed a five-year jail sentence.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a project manager with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, was arrested in April 2016 and later convicted of plotting to overthrow the clerical establishment.
Her family and the foundation, a charity that operates independently of media firm Thomson Reuters and its news subsidiary Reuters, deny the charge.
The propaganda charge relates to her alleged participation in a rally in front of the Iranian Embassy in London in 2009 and giving interview to the BBC Persian TV channel at the same time, according to her lawyer, Reuters reported.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who served out most of her five-year sentence in Tehran’s Evin prison, was released last March during the coronavirus pandemic and kept under house arrest until last Sunday. The authorities removed her ankle tag but immediately summoned her to court again on the other charge.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in a call with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Wednesday, said Zaghari-Ratcliffe must be allowed to return home to her family.
Iranian media reported that during the call, Rouhani raised the issue of a historical debt of 400 million pounds ($557 million) which Tehran says Britain owes the Islamic Republic in capital and interest for a 1970s arms deal with the then-Shah of Iran.
