UK – The Telegraph, Sept. 11, 2026
The British-Iranian mother speaks about missing her daughter’s childhood and how a love of sewing helped her survive
Ten years have passed since Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was held by Revolutionary Guards at Tehran Airport and accused of being a spy. An Iranian-British national, she was just about to fly back to London after celebrating Nowruz (Persian new year) with her family.
Her 22-month-old daughter, Gabriella, was in her arms as she was detained on April 3 2016. Locked up as a political prisoner on trumped-up charges for nearly six years, Zaghari-Ratcliffe first spent nine months in solitary confinement at Kerman, in south-east Iran, and was then at Evin Prison in the Iranian capital itself.
During her confinement, she was silently tortured by the Iranian regime, moved about blindfolded, tormented and toyed with psychologically. Solitary confinement dehumanised and traumatised her. Her cell was 1m by 2m, she had no lawyer, no visits, blinding light, no bed, no shower for days on end and only scraps of bread, cheese and jam to eat.
Release finally came on March 16 2022. But that was not the end of her torment. Zaghari-Ratcliffe has rarely talked about what happened next – as her story and that of her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, who twice went on hunger strike outside the Foreign Office, slowly fell out of the headlines.
She was certain that if her family and her marriage were going to have any chance of surviving her return, they needed quiet, counselling and privacy. Even that initial blast of publicity was too much. Cameras were there to catch the reunion “and I wish they hadn’t been”, she says now.
