Iran rejects reports on release of Zaghari

LONDON: The head of Iran´s justice ministry was quoted on Friday as saying Tehran would decide the fate of a detained British-Iranian aid worker sentenced to five years in jail and that he could not confirm Western media reports relating to her case.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a project manager with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, was arrested in April 2016 at a Tehran airport as she was heading back to Britain with her two-year-old daughter after a family visit.

She was convicted of plotting to overthrow Iran’s clerical establishment, a charge denied by her family and the Foundation, a charity organization that is independent of Thomson Reuters and operates independently of Reuters News.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe´s husband Richard Ratcliffe told the Guardian newspaper and other British media on Thursday that her lawyer had said that her case had been marked as being eligible for early release.