British-Iranian mother Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has been jailed for five years in Iran on “secret charges“, her husband says.
The charity worker was arrested in April on a family visit to Iran, and the passport of her two-year-old daughter Gabriella was seized; the child is staying with her grandparents in Iran.
She was allowed a phone call today to tell her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, that she had been given a five-year sentence, adding:
“It has been horrendous. I do not want to wake up each morning and remember where I am. I want to stay in my dreams.
“I have been here so long. Do you understand what it is like to be a mother kept away from her child this long?
“I have missed over a fifth of her life. What does that do to her?”
The family say there has never been clear information about what Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe is accused of, but Iranian officials have previously accused her of leading a “foreign-linked hostile network“.
Richard Ratcliffe told the BBC, “it remains extraordinary that Nazanin’s interrogators clarify the sentence but not the crime – because there is none.” The case was “shrouded in shadows and internal politics“, he added.
Petition to Free Nazanin Ratcliffe
(Sources: BBC News, The Independent)
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