Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s ordeal: a story of British arrogance, secret arms deals and Whitehall infighting
While his wife suffers in an Iranian jail, Richard Ratcliffe fights on for her release. But he fears she cannot cope for much longer. By Patrick Wintour
On a cold October night, Richard Ratcliffe, not for the first time, was watching a play about his wife’s ordeal in an Iranian prison. Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a dual-national British-Iranian, has been in detention in Tehran since her arrest on 3 April 2016. She is accused of spying – a charge she denies. The play was being staged in the London Metropolitan University on Holloway Road, where Zaghari-Ratcliffe, on a scholarship from Iran, studied communications management between 2007-2008.
Ratcliffe was sitting in the front row. Beside him sat Ana Diamond, a woman who was incarcerated in the same prison as Nazanin until 2016, and Diamond’s father. As the play unfolded, Diamond’s father, who had also spent years in an Iranian prison, broke into loud sobbing, making it nearly impossible to hear the dialogue. Even though he and his daughter were now free, watching the play forced him to relive the trauma of imprisonment.