Iran releases Iranian-British citizens as nuclear talks wrap up
Two Iranian-British citizens are on the way home after the United Kingdom settled a decades-old debt to Iran.
Two Iranian-British citizens who have been imprisoned in Iran were released this morning and are heading back home. Early reports were confirmed in a tweet by British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss.
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a charity worker, and Anoosheh Ashouri, an engineer, are reportedly on an airplane after departing Imam Khomeini Airport in Tehran. Zaghari-Ratcliffe was detained in 2016 and Ashouri was detained in 2017. Both were charged with politically motivated crimes, according to international human rights organizations.
Iran’s Fars News Agency reported that the United Kingdom had repaid a debt of about $530 million to Iran, owed in relation to a 1976 arms deal. The United Kingdom had been reluctant to pay the money due to US sanctions and fear of secondary sanctions from the US Treasury. The debt has been a source of contention between the two countries.
Fars reported that Zaghari-Ratcliffe had served her time for “the crime of spying for the UK.” A separate article in Tasnim News Agency claimed to show Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s connections to various revolutions in Arab countries and the so-called color revolutions in the Caucasus.
