The husband of former Iran hostage Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has said a film about her six-year incarceration has been produced to help other British hostages held by the regime in Tehran.
Richard Ratcliffe has spoken out against what was widely regarded as the state kidnapping of his wife, as well as criticising what he sees as the disinterest of British politicians in pushing for her release.
Mr Ratcliffe, an accountant in London, campaigned vigorously for his wife's release, including going on a 21-day hunger strike outside the UK Foreign Office to bring attention to her plight.
The BBC has turned their ordeal into a film called Prisoner 951, which stars Narges Rashidi and Joseph Fiennes in the lead roles. Mr Ratcliffe said he gave the film his full co-operation “because other people do go through similar things and there are British citizens being held in Iran still and I want the lessons to be learnt from our case”.
Among UK citizens still detained by Iran are British couple Craig and Lindsay Foreman, who were arrested in January this year on charges of espionage.
Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a dual Iran-British citizen, was detained in early 2016, largely as part of a long-running financial dispute between the two countries. In September 2016, she was jailed for five years after an Iranian court found her guilty of plotting to overthrow the government, working for British intelligence, “empowering women” and earning money illegally.
Mr Ratcliffe not only endured time apart from her but also their daughter Gabriella, who was kept separately in Iran. He was initially told not to speak to the media by the Foreign Office, which said it was working for her release behind the scenes.
But he began receiving cryptic messages from the regime referring to a decades-old deal between Iran and the UK. Using his skills as a forensic accountant, he discovered that the former shah paid £600 million ($782.4 million) for 1,500 Chieftain tanks and 250 armoured vehicles in 1971. But the deal was cancelled after the shah was toppled in 1979, with only 185 Chieftains delivered. Britain said sanctions against Iran meant it could not provide a refund for the remaining tanks.
Mr Ratcliffe experienced significant publicity after he made the details known to the press. “He’s fiercely intelligent and there’s a tenacity and a strength there,” Mr Fiennes told The Times. “He’s a husband and a father foremost, and then a brilliant forensic accountant. And I think that’s his superpower. The bottom line for Richard, as an accountant, is: show me the receipt.”
He added that it was “diabolical” for Mr Ratcliffe to spend six years “torn away from your baby because of a debt Britain didn’t pay”.
“Nobody comes off well,” the actor added. “The regime in Iran was obviously appalling in its behaviour, but also the Foreign Office in its silence.”
During the UK’s period of post-Brexit political turbulence, the country went through five foreign secretaries while Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe was in prison, including two future prime ministers, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.
Each left the Foreign Office before they could properly address the politics behind the detention. But finally, in 2022, Ms Truss said Britain would repay the £400 million and of Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe was freed and flew home.
Mr Ratcliffe said making Prisoner 951, a four-part series that is to be broadcast on Sunday, was “very cathartic” and allowed him to put together “a big jigsaw that I could not makes sense of before".
“None of us like to dwell on bad times, so some of reliving the past is remembering stuff that I went through and certainly for Nazanin, which was awful,” he told the BBC.
The film ends with the pair reunited in 2022 and Mr Ratcliffe intimated that the experience had an impact on the family. “In terms of putting together things afterwards … that’s probably a bit of work in progress, if I’m honest,” he said.
