British-Iranian aid worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has concluded her five-year sentence in Iran on spying charges, but has now been called to court on a separate charge, according to her lawyer, Al Jazeera reported over the weekend.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who been held in Iran since 2016 and has spent the past year under house arrest in Tehran after being taken out of prison last March due to the coronavirus pandemic, had her electronic tag taken off as sentence ended.
However, she now must appear in court on March 14 on a charge of "propaganda against the system" for giving an interview to BBC Persian outside Iran's London embassy regarding disputed election results in 2009.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who was a project manager for the Thomson Reuters Foundation charity at the time of her arrest, was originally imprisoned in 2016 while visiting family in Iran with her young daughter.
British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab called for Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s release on Twitter Saturday, writing, “We welcome the removal of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s ankle tag, but Iran’s continued treatment of her is intolerable. She must be allowed to return to the UK as soon as possible to be reunited with her family.”
The ordeal has deepened a political dispute between Iran and the United Kingdom, with rights groups and Western officials saying her case is one of several instances of the Iranian regime arbitrarily imprisoning foreigners on trumped-up charges in order to use them for political leverage, according to Al Jazeera.
© 2023 Newsmax. All rights reserved.