January 22, 2021
with her daughter in Tehran before Gabriella
returned to Britain to start school.
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe said that when she was first arrested her interrogators told her that her British husband, who has never lived in Iran, was a spy and threatened to take her then two-year-old daughter away from her.
She said they also insisted so consistently that she was herself a spy that she began to think the allegations might actually be true. Zaghari-Ratcliffe, now 42 years old, described her first 40 days of imprisonment for fellow prisoner Narges Mohammadi, who included the account in her new book, “White Torture,” which cites numerous interviews with women imprisoned in Iran on political charges. Zaghari-Ratcliffe will complete her five-year sentence for spying next April.
But she has now been charged anew and could be kept in jail beyond April if convicted again. She was brought to court November 2, but the trial was adjourned before she ever testified and no date for the next session was announced.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe has been on furlough since March because of the coronavirus epidemic. She has been staying at her parents’ home in Tehran, but wears an ankle bracelet and is forbidden to go more than 300 meters from the family home. Before she was taken to court for the latest trial, she was told to pack her bags as she would be taken back to Evin Prison after the trial session. However, the guards drove her back to her parents’ home.
At the trial, she was told her new offense was “propaganda against the regime.” But that was one of the charges on which she was previously charged and she said the evidence presented in court this time was the same as before with nothing new added to justify a new charge. Zaghari-Ratcliffe told Mohammadi that she spent the first 40 days in total isolation.
In her early imprisonment, ZaghariRatcliffe said she endured days with no sleep, but with panic attacks, fainting and regular attempts by her interrogators to force her to sign a confession of espionage. She told Mohammadi the ordeal was so distressing that she came to “doubt herself” and question whether the accusations might be real.
“They tried to induce me to say something that didn’t exist. They said they had top-secret evidence that I worked for the [British] parliament and against Iran,” she said.
“I was sure that was not the case, but they repeated it so much that I doubted myself when I returned to the cell. I spent long hours in my cell wondering if the projects I had worked on had anything to do with Iran.
Then I told myself that I was 100 percent sure that my projects had nothing to do with Iran. But, after each interrogation, I would review these cases over and over again,” she said.
“The interrogators threatened to send Gabriella [her daughter] to London if I did not cooperate. They kept telling me that I had lost my job [in Britain] and that if interrogation took too long my husband would leave me. They asked me to tell them about my friends and their work projects. I had not really slept for three weeks.
I had not seen my child and I was under a lot of pressure.” After her initial interrogation, Zaghari-Ratcliffe was allowed to meet her family, but she hardly recognized her daughter. During the visitations, she said she struggled when her daughter asked her to go to her parents’ house. “Every time she [Gabriella] cried goodbye, I would break down,” she said. “The interrogators were present in the meeting room.
When saying goodbye, I wanted to go ahead and tie her shoes for her, but they wouldn’t let me and I had to leave her.” After the brief trial session in November, British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab was able to speak with her over the telephone.
He said afterward, “It is appalling that Iran has begun a new case against Mrs. ZaghariRatcliffe and have threatened her with return to prison. The Iranian authorities have put an intolerable burden on Nazanin and her family.”