TEHRAN: An Iranian Revolutionary court has sentenced Iranian-British aid worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe to five years in prison on charges that remain secret, her family said on Friday.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe was detained in early April as she tried to leave Iran after a visit with her two-year-old daughter.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have accused her of trying to overthrow Iran’s clerical establishment. The official charges against her have not been made public and the Iranian authorities were not immediately available for comment.
“On Sept. 6 Nazanin was sentenced to five years imprisonment by Judge Salavati of the Revolutionary Court,” her family said in a statement.“Nazanin confirmed this sentence to her husband in a phone call today (Sept. 9). She is expected to serve her sentence in Evin prison,” the statement added.
Her husband Richard Ratcliffe said in the family’s statement: “A sentence with secret charges still seems crazy. Literally it is a punishment without a crime.”
Zaghari-Ratcliffe works for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, a London-based charity that is independent of Thomson Reuters and operates independently of Reuters News. The Foundation and her husband have dismissed the Revolutionary Guards’ accusation. The 37-year-old, who appeared in court for the first time in August, according to Iranian media and her family, was arrested at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport as she tried to leave Iran after visiting her parents.
She was separated from her two-year-old daughter, Gabriella, who has remained in the care of her grandparents.
UK-Iranian mother jailed on ‘secret charges’ for 5 years
UK-Iranian mother jailed on ‘secret charges’ for 5 years
The UN says Al-Hol camp population has dropped sharply as Syria moves to relocate remaining families
The UN says Al-Hol camp population has dropped sharply as Syria moves to relocate remaining families
- Forces of Syria’s central government captured the Al-Hol camp on Jan. 21 during a weekslong offensive against the SDF, which had been running the camp near the border with Iraq for a decade
DAMASCUS: The UN refugee agency said Sunday that a large number of residents of a camp housing family members of suspected Daesh group militants have left and the Syrian government plans to relocate those who remain.
Gonzalo Vargas Llosa, UNHCR’s representative in Syria, said in a statement that the agency “has observed a significant decrease in the number of residents in Al-Hol camp in recent weeks.”
“Syrian authorities have informed UNHCR of their plan to relocate the remaining families to Akhtarin camp in Aleppo Governorate (province) and have requested UNHCR’s support to assist the population in the new camp, which we stand ready to provide,” he said.
He added that UNHCR “will continue to support the return and reintegration of Syrians who have departed Al-Hol, as well as those who remain.”
The statement did not say how residents had left the camp or how many remain. Many families are believed to have escaped either during the chaos when government forces captured the camp from the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces last month or afterward.
There was no immediate statement from the Syrian government and a government spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
At its peak after the defeat of IS in Syria in 2019, around 73,000 people were living at Al-Hol. Since then, the number has declined with some countries repatriating their citizens. The camp’s residents are mostly children and women, including many wives or widows of IS members.
The camp’s residents are not technically prisoners and most have not been accused of crimes, but they have been held in de facto detention at the heavily guarded facility.
Forces of Syria’s central government captured the Al-Hol camp on Jan. 21 during a weekslong offensive against the SDF, which had been running the camp near the border with Iraq for a decade. A ceasefire deal has since ended the fighting.
Separately, thousands of accused IS militants who were held in detention centers in northeastern Syria have been transferred to Iraq to stand trial under an agreement with the US
The US military said Friday that it had completed the transfer of more than 5,700 adult male IS suspects from detention facilities in Syria to Iraqi custody.
Iraq’s National Center for International Judicial Cooperation said a total of 5,704 suspects from 61 countries who were affiliated with IS — most of them Syrian and Iraqi — were transferred from prisons in Syria. They are now being interrogated in Iraq.
