TEHRAN: An Iranian-British woman detained in Iran on charges of seeking to overthrow the government was implicated in anti-regime protests in 2009, a judicial official said.
There had previously been scant information about the grounds for the arrest in April of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a 37-year-old employee of the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
But a report from Iran’s Mizan news agency late Friday said she was implicated in mass protests against the re-election of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009, a movement dubbed “the sedition” by the authorities.
“In 2014-2015, the intelligence service of the Revolutionary Guards in Kerman province identified and arrested members of one of the groups that during the sedition conducted activities against the security of the country by designing websites and carrying out campaigns in the media,” Yadollah Movahed, head of Kerman’s justice department, told Mizan.
“Some of the group were outside Iran, including the suspect Nazanin Zaghari,” he added.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe was arrested at Tehran airport on April 3 as she prepared to return to Britain with her two-year-old daughter after visiting family in Iran.
In June, Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards had said Zaghari-Ratcliffe was accused of being “involved in the soft overthrow of the Islamic republic through... her membership in foreign companies and institutions.”
Iran does not recognize dual citizenship, and if put on trial she will be considered an Iranian.
Held UK-Iranian woman linked to 2009 protests
Held UK-Iranian woman linked to 2009 protests
Turkiye’s foreign minister says the US and Iran showing flexibility on nuclear deal, FT reports
- Hakan Fidan: “It is positive that the Americans appear willing to tolerate Iranian enrichment within clearly set boundaries”
- Washington has until now demanded Iran relinquish its stockpile of uranium enriched to up to 60 percent fissile purity
The United States and Iran are showing flexibility on a nuclear deal, with Washington appearing “willing” to tolerate some nuclear enrichment, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan told the Financial Times in an interview published Thursday.
“It is positive that the Americans appear willing to tolerate Iranian enrichment within clearly set boundaries,” Fidan, who has been involved in talks with both Washington and Tehran, told the FT.
“The Iranians now recognize that they need to reach a deal with the Americans, and the Americans understand that the Iranians have certain limits. It’s pointless to try to force them.”
Washington has until now demanded Iran relinquish its stockpile of uranium enriched to up to 60 percent fissile purity, a small step away from the 90 percent that is considered weapons grade.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has said Iran would continue to demand the lifting of financial sanctions and insist on its nuclear rights including enrichment.
Fidan told the FT he believed Tehran “genuinely wants to reach a real agreement” and would accept restrictions on enrichment levels and a strict inspection regime, as it did in the 2015 agreement with the US and others. US and Iranian diplomats held talks through Omani mediators in Oman last week in an effort to revive diplomacy, after President Donald Trump positioned a naval flotilla in the region, raising fears of new military action. Trump on Tuesday said he was considering sending a second aircraft carrier to the Middle East, even as Washington and Tehran prepared to resume negotiations.
The Turkish foreign minister, however, cautioned that broadening the Iran-US talks to ballistic missiles would bring “nothing but another war.”
The US State Department and the White House did not respond to a request for comment outside regular business hours.
