Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 44, was born and raised in Tehran and studied English literature at the capital’s university before becoming an English teacher. After a devastating earthquake in Iran in 2003, she went to work as a translator in the relief effort for the Japanese International Cooperation Agency.
She then went to work for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies before moving to the World Health Organization as a communications officer.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe came to the UK in 2007 after securing a scholarship at London Metropolitan University to study for a masters in communication management. It was a month after her arrival in the UK that she met her future husband, Richard Ratcliffe, through mutual friends.
Describing their first date, Ratcliffe, an accountant, said they “clicked” and he felt as if he had “come home”.
The couple were married in August 2009 in Winchester and their daughter, Gabriella, was born in June 2014, something Mr Ratcliffe said changed both their outlooks on life.
“It was very important for Nazanin to keep going back to Iran to show her daughter to her parents … Before she would always go once a year, but she tried to go twice after,” he said.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe began working at Thomson Reuters Foundation in 2011 as a project coordinator before taking on the role of a project manager.
Ratcliffe described his wife as very house-proud, meticulous and tidy, and said she has a “pretty keen sense of justice” and is “outraged” by what has happened to her and her daughter.
On 17 March 2016, Zaghari-Ratcliffe travelled to Iran to visit family for Iranian New Year with Gabriella, then nearly two years old. On 3 April 2016, members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard arrested her at Imam Khomeini Airport as she and her daughter were about to board a flight back to the UK.
Until her release on 16 March 2022, she was held in Iran and accused of plotting to overthrow the country’s government, which she denied. She is returning to the UK.
Anoosheh Ashoori
Anoosheh Ashoori, 67, is a British-Iranian businessman. He spent 10 years in the UK from 1972, while he studied mechanical and aeronautical engineering, before returning to Iran to take care of his ailing father. He returned to the UK in 2005 to expand his business abroad.
Iranian authorities arrested him in August 2017, when he visited his mother.
In August 2019, he was sentenced to 12 years in prison – 10 years for allegedly “spying for Israel’s Mossad” and two years for “acquiring illegitimate wealth”. Ashoori denied both charges.
According to Amnesty International UK, Ashoori was “subjected to torture, repeatedly interrogated without a lawyer present, and forced to sign ‘confessions’ while sleep-deprived”.
It described the prison conditions he was in as “overcrowded and unhygienic”.
In January 2020, Ashoori’s wife, Sherry Izadi, who lives in London, said she feared he had no “hope in hell” of being released. She also said her husband had attempted suicide twice and went on a 17-day hunger strike in protest against his detention.
In a piece for the Guardian, Ashoori described his experience in prison. He wrote: “Every day, I face a choice: make or break. I tried to kill myself once, when in the torture house called 209. When you hit absolute rock bottom, the only way back up is to rise again and be reincarnated. I have to stop the feeling of pure rage or of self-pity. Break isn’t a choice; only survival. I am not the same person who stepped into prison.”
He was released on 16 March and is returning to the UK.
Responding to his release, Ashoori’s family said: “This day has been a long time coming, and we are thankful for the efforts of everyone involved in bringing Anoosheh home. 1,672 days ago our family’s foundations were rocked when our father and husband was unjustly detained and taken away from us.
“Now we can look forward to rebuilding those same foundations with our cornerstone back in place.”
Morad Tahbaz
Morad Tahbaz, who was born in Hammersmith, London, is a tri-national (Iranian-American-British) businessman and conservationist.
He graduated from Colgate University in Hamilton, in the state of New York, in 1977 with a degree in liberal arts and from Columbia University in 1983 with an MBA.
Tahbaz was a co-founder of the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation (PWHF) and in January 2018, Iranian authorities arrested him along with eight other PWHF-linked individuals.
The group were accused of espionage after tracking endangered species with cameras. They had been researching endangered animals such as the Asiatic cheetah and the Persian leopard.
Iranian authorities said the conservationists has been using the scientific and environmental projects as a cover for collecting classified information and in November 2019, the Iranian judiciary sentenced Tahbaz to 10 years in prison for “contacts with the US enemy government”.
UN human rights experts said it was “hard to fathom how working to preserve the Iranian flora and fauna can possibly be linked to conducting espionage against Iranian interests”, while a government committee concluded that there was no evidence to suggest they were spies.
Tahbaz was held in the notorious Evin prison. Amnesty have described him as a “prisoner of conscience” and said there was evidence that Tahbaz was among those subjected to “torture and other ill-treatment”, including prolonged solitary confinement.
US officials had also been calling for Tahbaz’s release with the US special envoy for Iran, Robert Malley, describing him as a “father, an environmentalist and a cancer victim”. On 16 March 2022, he was released on furlough and remains in Iran.
The UK foreign secretary, Liz Truss, said Tahbaz had been unable to return to the UK due to complications arising from his US citizenship.
