UK says Iran’s treatment of Zaghari-Ratcliffe is ‘torture’

LONDON: Iran’s treatment of detained dual national Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe amounts to "torture" and she is being held hostage, Britain said on Sunday, after she was convicted anew and banned from leaving the Islamic republic.

The British-Iranian woman has been held in Iran since 2016. In late April, she was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment and banned from leaving the country for a further 12 months. British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, who spoke to Zaghari-Ratcliffe on Wednesday, said she was being held "unlawfully" and "being treated in the most abusive" way.

"I think it amounts to torture the way she’s being treated, and there is a very clear, unequivocal obligation on the Iranians to release her," he told BBC television on Sunday. Her husband Richard Ratcliffe argues she is being held hostage as part of a diplomatic stratagem.

"I think it’s very difficult to argue against that characterisation," Raab said, going further than previous UK denunciations over the case. "It is clear that she is subjected to a cat and mouse game that the Iranians, or certainly part of the Iranian system, engage with and they try and use her for leverage on the UK." Richard Ratcliffe has linked his wife’s plight to a British debt dating back more than 40 years for army tanks paid for by the shah of Iran.