LONDON: The husband of a British-Iranian woman who has been detained in Iran for over half a decade has slammed UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson for showing a “real lack of leadership” in the fight to bring his wife home.
Richard Ratcliffe is on the 10th day of a hunger strike aimed at pressuring London to do more to bring his wife Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe home.
She has languished in Iranian detention for over five years after being accused of plotting to overthrow the regime while visiting family in Tehran in 2016. She has always vehemently denied the accusation.
Ratcliffe and his family are “angry” at the British government’s lack of progress in freeing his wife, he told The Independent, adding that the “idea the government has sat around for five-and-a-half years, not solving our case, is unconscionable.”
But the Ratcliffe family’s relationship with Johnson has not always been so strained. Zaghari-Ratcliffe exchanged letters with him while she was jailed in Iran’s Evin prison, and she knitted Johnson’s son Wilfred a “little woolly hat” when he was born last year, Ratcliffe said.
“And the prime minister wrote her a lovely card, saying ‘thank you’ and how much he appreciated it — so the human side is there, but there’s a disconnect between that human sympathy and the policy to take her out the situation she’s in.”
Ratcliffe said the government is risking “the credibility of the UK’s ability to protect” its own people.
“Where’s the government’s moral compass?” he asked. “It’s almost like citizens are expendable.”
He said he spoke to his wife Wednesday morning and she was feeling “agitated and helpless.”
Following Tehran’s confirmation on Monday that it would attend the ongoing COP26 Summit in Glasgow, Ratcliffe pledged to continue his hunger strike at least until “after Iran has attended COP26” because he would “like to disrupt that as much as possible.”
