UK – Independent, June 09, 2026
Britain is holding an ageing Iranian stalker whose deportation could help spare Lindsay and Craig Foreman from a 10-year jail sentence – so what is stopping us from bringing them home, ask Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Richard Ratcliffe
For a hostage and their family, it is much easier emotionally when you finally know what is actually going on. It gives light in the desperation. You just need to find the tunnel out.
Craig and Lindsay Foreman, the couple jailed after being arrested on a motorbike tour in Iran last January, believe they have the rationale for their own arrest. Tehran wants Richard Jan, an Iranian national and convicted stalker who has been in prison here in the UK for 20 years, returned. On the weekend, hope of finding that tunnel came from David Lammy, who observed that “arrangements can be made”. His honesty was refreshing.
That is why it was so deflating that the Foreign Office called the reporting of the link between the cases by this paper and Sky News “grossly irresponsible and deeply regrettable” and urged other media to drop the story. They claimed that the story “risks hindering all the other efforts currently being made by this government”.
There’s a lot of crying wolf in hostage cases.
The link was first made to the family in the presence of the British Embassy six months ago. The government can hardly be surprised when its inaction led to it being made public. Lindsay and Craig should not have needed to go on hunger strike to make their desperation clear.
We were on the receiving end of the same scare tactics in 2016, when Nazanin was first arrested and told by her captors that her imprisonment was connected to the UK failing to deliver tanks Iran bought in the 1970s. The UK government consistently argued that the £400m tank debt – which dated back to a 1970s deal with the pre-revolution Iranian regime – and the imprisonment of British-Iranian dual nationals were “entirely separate issues”. The media took the government at its word; Nazanin got held for another five years.
The UK’s government, with its churn of ministers, often has a convenient amnesia. But the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps operates like an elephant with a grudge. Time and again, they called for Jan’s release. Following the rejection of his parole in 2024, when the board refused to consider the submissions from Iran, the Foremans were arrested. Perhaps it was a coincidence. Yet the Guard clarified the link to the British Embassy directly in front of their victims.
Why has the government sat on its hands? The decision-making is hard to fathom. We have a policy of deportation of foreign criminals, yet it hasn’t been applied in this case. Nor is it clear what we are holding Jan for. Why not unilaterally deport him without an exchange, especially when there was the appetite for it in 2021? The cost to the UK taxpayer since Jan’s deportation request? Almost £1m.
Jan is guilty of his crimes. But he has served his sentence and then some. Now, 16 years beyond the end of his tariff, his imprisonment looks increasingly like open-ended detention. At what point does a refusal to deport look like leverage in a standoff? Our family lost six years to this sort of government by procrastination.
