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| - British-Iranian national Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has spent five years in jail in Tehran and under house arrest, separated from her husband and young daughter. Held in the notorious Evin prison for four years, she spent time in solitary confinement in windowless cells, declared hunger strikes and had medical treatment withheld. She was detained at Tehran airport on April 3, 2016, as she was leaving with her daughter Gabriella, then aged one, after visiting family for Iranian New Year. Nazanin, now 42, was working at the time as a project manager for Thomson Reuters Foundation -- the media organisation's philanthropic wing. Tehran accused her of plotting to overthrow the Islamic republic's regime -- a charge she fiercely denies. "She's always been someone with a keen sense of loyalty and justice. And definitely deeply outraged to how unfair all this is," her British husband, Richard Ratcliffe, told AFP last year. The authorities separated her from her daughter, whose British passport was confiscated. In September 2016, she was sentenced to five years in jail. While in prison, she suffered from lack of hygiene and even contemplated suicide, said Ratcliffe, a London accountant who has thrown himself into a campaign to free her. "More than a month she had to sleep in the same clothes, which was really hard for her," he said. From being a "playful" person, she had become "a lot more sombre -- depressed, to be honest", he said. Nazanin was only granted temporary release on house arrest last year, with her sentence due to end on March 7. Her husband said in January that the UK government had asked him to keep the date quiet to avoid jeopardising her release. This week, he called her case a "blot on British diplomacy". The Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office said it was in "close contact" with Nazanin and continuing "to do everything we can to secure the release of arbitrarily detained British nationals". While in prison, Nazanin read a lot and sewed clothes for her daughter and fellow inmates, her husband said, adding she was doing this "as a way of being a mum still". Her main source of joy were visits from Gabriella, whose photo she kept on a bedside table in her cell. Gabriella had her British passport returned but stayed on with Nazanin's parents to enable her see her mother. Now six, she returned to Britain in 2019 to live with her father and start school. "There is no measure to my pain," Nazanin wrote at the time. In March 2020, she was moved to house arrest with her parents due to the coronavirus pandemic. She thinks she has had Covid but has never been tested. Until Sunday, she had been tagged and could not go further than 300 metres from her parents' home in Tehran. Since then she has been video-calling Gabriella daily. After her temporary release from jail, Nazanin learned that she would not be eligible for pardon, unlike thousands of other prisoners. Then in September last year, she heard she faced a fresh indictment, without being informed of the charges, a move the UK condemned as "indefensible". But the trial was postponed. Her husband said she was clearly a "hostage" in a sinister political game over a longstanding UK debt to Iran. The debt dates back over 40 years to when the shah of Iran paid Britain £400 million for 1,500 Chieftain tanks. When the shah was ousted in 1979, Britain refused to deliver the tanks to the new Islamic republic but kept the money. Tehran has sparked tensions with Western governments in recent years with detentions of their citizens and dual nationals, sparking UK claims they are being used as "diplomatic leverage". Ratcliffe met his wife in 2007 when she was studying in London. They married two years later. Nazanin had already gained a degree in English literature from the University of Tehran and had worked for the Red Cross and the World Health Organization in Iran. In London, she worked for BBC Media Action, the broadcaster's international charity that supports independent media, before joining the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Britain in March 2019 escalated her case to a dispute between states rather than a consular matter, citing her ill-treatment in jail. Earlier, in 2017, Boris Johnson, while Foreign Secretary set back her case by implying she had been training journalists in Iran. He later apologised, confirming she was on holiday. In a letter to her husband a year after her arrest, she said she had once been proud of being Iranian. But Tehran had prevented her from "seeing the golden years of our daughter's life". mpa-am/phz/jj
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