Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is enjoying her first taste of freedom in six years, but has shown an unquenchable desire to fight for justice for another dual citizen detained by Iranian authorities.
To mark their first day back together, the aid worker released a selfie she snapped with her husband Richard Ratcliffe and their daughter Gabriella.
The three beamed at the camera as they posed in front of daffodils in the snap released by their local MP, Tulip Siddiq.
She said that hours after Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe arrived back in Britain, the dual British-Iranian citizen and her British husband “raised the plight of Morad Tahbaz with me”.
“Here I was hoping to sleep for a week,” joked the Labour MP, who has for six years campaigned with Mr Ratcliffe for his wife’s release.
Despite the huge amount of work ahead of her, Ms Siddiq said it was “lovely to have uplifting conversations with” the couple on Thursday while they enjoyed time away as a family at a government safe house.
Before his release on furlough this week, Mr Tahbaz, who holds British, Iranian and US citizenship, was being kept in Evin prison in Tehran on charges of espionage after he used cameras to track endangered species as part of his conservation work.
British Foreign Office Minister James Cleverly said Mr Tahbaz’s US citizenship had complicated the situation on the Iranian side, but insisted: “We are going to keep working to get him home, to get him fully and properly released.”
Before on Wednesday boarding a flight from Tehran to the UK, via Oman, Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe spoke about her first weeks in detainment in Tehran. In an interview with Narges Mohammadi, an Iranian human rights activist who has recently been imprisoned in the capital, Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe went into detail about her horrific treatment.
After being arrested at the airport while trying to board a flight to the UK with her 22-month-old daughter in April 2016, Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe was taken to Kermann Prison and placed in solitary confinement.
“I couldn’t sleep a wink for the first week. My heart palpitated so hard that when I put my head on the blanket it felt as if it would explode,” she said, in an article published by The Telegraph.
From day one she was subjected to intense interrogations and suffered from bouts of sickness owing to a lack of hygiene and poor-quality food.
She said she was kept apart from her daughter for the first 40 days and when she was eventually allowed to see her she felt too weak to stand up.
Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe revealed that interrogators “threatened that I would receive a heavy sentence unless I confessed to espionage”.
They also played on her marriage to her British accountant husband, telling her she “did not know” him “and that he was a spy and that he had lied about where he worked”.
Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe was detained on security charges in 2016 by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard at Imam Khomeini airport after a holiday visit to Iran, where she introduced her daughter to her parents.
She was accused of plotting to overthrow the Iranian government and sentenced to five years behind bars on charges that were kept secret. She served the final year of her sentence under house arrest at her parents' home in Tehran before being handed back her passport this week and flown out of the country.
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