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Iran Frees British Charity Worker After Six Years in Detention

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who became a pawn in diplomatic conflict between U.K. and Iran after arrest in 2016, finally freed by Teheran.

A British-Iranian charity worker arrested six years ago while on holiday in Tehran and accused of fomenting an anti-government plot, has been freed after the U.K. reportedly agreed to release $500 million in frozen Iranian assets. Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was detained in April 2016 while visiting Iran to introduce her baby daughter to her parents in Tehran. Zaghari-Ratcliffe was a project manager with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of the U.K. news agency. But after Boris Johnson, then foreign secretary, casually told MPs that she was “simply teaching people journalism,” which was not true, she was given a five-year prison term for engaging in anti-government propaganda, becoming a pawn in a wider diplomatic and financial conflict. Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s release, after a further year under house arrest at her parents’ home, comes as part of a wider prisoner exchange—the Fars news agency said another dual British-Iranian citizen, Anousheh Ashouri, was also being freed—and will raise hopes for a revival of the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal torn up by Donald Trump.