LONDON: The husband of a British-Iranian mother jailed in Tehran since 2016 said on Saturday the couple´s decision to send their five-year-old daughter to him in Britain to start school was “bittersweet”.
Richard Ratcliffe, whose wife Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is serving a five-year term for sedition, told AFP he is looking forward to seeing daughter Gabriella for the first time in more than three years. But she has been staying with relatives in Iran since her mother´s detention and visiting her in jail each week, so he fears the impact of the change.
“It will be bittersweet,” Ratcliffe said, adding they hoped Gabriella will be back in London by Christmas.
“It will be lovely to have her back... and then also we will be weary of the fallout for Nazanin,” Ratcliffe added, noting Gabriella had been “her lifeline and that lifeline will have been taken away.”
Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 40, stated in an open letter released earlier this week that Gabriella, who only speaks a few words of English, would return to Britain “in the near future”. “My baby will leave me to go to her father and start school in the UK,” she wrote. “It will be a daunting trip for her travelling, and for me left behind.
“And the authorities who hold me will watch on, unmoved at the injustice of separation,” Zaghari-Ratcliffe added, describing being apart from her daughter as the “deepest torture of them all.”