Iran claims 'proof' Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was training journalists before arrest

Iran has levelled further allegations at imprisoned British-Iranian charity worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, including what it claims is proof that she was training Iranian journalists.

The allegations, complete with a close-up of an April 2010 pay stub from Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s former employer, the BBC World Service Trust, appeared on Iranian state television last week, it emerged on Sunday.

Along with the old pay stub, the report featured a June 2010 email where Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe referred to the "ZigZag Academy," a BBC World Service Trust project where she had a role allegedly training “young aspiring journalists from Iran and Afghanistan through a secure online platform."

But BBC Media Action, Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s former employer (then known as the World Service Trust), said she was never employed in this capacity.  

According to a statement sent to the Telegraph, “Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe was never a journalism trainer but undertook administrative duties such as travel bookings, typing, and filing.”  

“It is factually wrong to state that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe ever worked for BBC Persian. She did not.”   The statement notes that BBC World Trust did deliver “an online journalism development project aimed at young people in Iran” which ended in 2012, and briefed the Iranian Ministry of the Interior on this project “some years ago”.

Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe left the BBC in 2011 and then joined the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of the news agency. Both her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, and Thomson Reuters repeatedly have stressed she was not training journalists or involved in any work regarding Iran while there.

Mr Ratcliffe said on Sunday that the timing of the broadcast was designed to put further pressure on London as it considers making a £400 million payment to Tehran.

He said the material appeared to have been sourced from his wife’s email, which was accessed by the Revolutionary Guards after her arrest.

"It's trying to justify the new charges," Mr Ratcliffe said.

Condemning the show for putting her next trial at risk, he told the Press Association: "I think it is spectacularly unlikely she will have a fair trial.

"Everything about my experience to date with the Iranian court system has been that it has had little regard for due process, it has been illegal at every stage.

"It is illegal to be prejudicing a trial in Iran this way, but they are still doing it."

A picture of a group of Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe's fellow mothers in London was "packaged as though they're sort of a network of spies", he added.

Upon seeing the news while in jail, he told the Press Association how Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe collapsed, had a panic attack, and had to be injected with a vitamin B complex and a sedative to calm her down.

Mr Ratcliffe, whose daughter Gabriella remains in Iran with her grandparents, said: "There are grains of truth...and there's stuff that's just plain fantasy" in the show.

In recent weeks, the case of Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe has gathered new momentum in the UK, with a support rally taking place in London on Saturday and growing pressure on Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson to resolve the matter.

Mr Johnson has come under fierce criticism for erroneously stating to a parliamentary committee that Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe was “teaching people journalism” at the time of her arrest. 

Despite having walked back from the statement at a later date, Mr Johnson’s words have been held up by the Iranians as damning evidence of Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s guilt. The misstatement was again highlighted in yesterday/SUNDAY's seven-minute special report.

Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe is already serving a five-year sentence in Tehran’s Evin prison, but new charges could draw out her prison term by 16 years.

The 38-year-old travelled to Tehran with her toddler daughter on 17 March 2016 for a family visit. 

Sixteen days later, as mother and child were about to board a flight back to the UK, members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard arrested Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe. Her daughter, now three years old, remains in Iran in the care of relatives.

In September 2016, Iran sentenced Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe to five years in prison for planning to topple the Iranian regime. 

It alleges she was providing training to Iranian journalists – something she, her husband and her employer, the Thompson Reuters Foundation, deny.

The report comes as Britain and Iran discuss the release of some £400 million held by London, a payment Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi made for Chieftain tanks that were never delivered. The shah abandoned the throne in 1979 and the Islamic Revolution soon installed the clerically overseen system that endures today.

Though the payment is historical in its origins and has no formal link to this case, the return of these funds could serve to generate goodwill on the Iranian side, to the end of securing an early release for Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe.

The practice is not unheard of. In January 2016, Tehran released four Iranian-Americans including Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian after the US handed Iran $400 million in cash.

In September, a UN panel cautioned of  "an emerging pattern involving the arbitrary deprivation of liberty of dual nationals" in Iran.

One Iranian-Canadian, at least one Iranian-American, and one Chinese-American are currently known to be imprisoned in Iran on espionage and crimes against the Iranian state.