In March 2016, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and her young daughter travelled to visit her family in Iran for New Year.
On April 3, 2016, she was arrested at Imam Khomeini airport as she tried to leave for the UK. Thus began a six-year ordeal in which Nazanin underwent treatment designed to break her body and spirit – and that of her husband, Richard, waiting for her safe return back in London.
Now, Nazanin’s story has been adapted into a BBC drama. Titled Prisoner 951 – Nazanin’s real-life prisoner number during her stay in Iran’s notorious Evin jail – it stars Narges Rashidi as Nazanin, and Joseph Fiennes as her husband Richard.
Most people in the UK are familiar with Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s name. But what’s the full story of her imprisonment? We dive in.
The beginning
Born Nazanin Zaghari in 1978, she grew up in Tehran and studied English literature before becoming an English teacher and moving into translation work, especially with charities like the Red Cross, Red Crescent and later the World Health Organisation.
In 2007, Zaghari was accepted onto a scholarship to study for a Masters in communication management at London Metropolitan University. It was there that she met Richard Ratcliffe: the two shared mutual friends.
They married in 2009, and she became a British citizen in 2013. In June 2014, their daughter, Gabriella, was born.
In the time leading up to her arrest, Zaghari-Ratcliffe used to travel to and from Iran frequently to see her family. As the law stated, she had to use her Iranian passport to enter and leave the country – though she used her British passport for everything else.
The arrest
In March 2016, Zaghari-Ratcliffe travelled to see her family for Nowruz, the Iranian New Year. But as she prepared to leave, she was arrested at the airport by members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Her daughter, Gabriella, had her British passport confiscated too – though this was later returned and she was allowed to stay with her grandparents in Iran.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe wasn’t so lucky. The pretext for her arrest wasn’t clear, but seemed to be that she had worked for the BBC World Service Trust for a year between 2009 and 2010 – and the Iranians seemed to believe the BBC charity was a front for spies.
She protested her innocence, but still – in September, she was sentenced to five years in prison for apparently plotting to overthrow the Iranian government. According to the prosecutor general, she was guilty of running "a BBC Persian online journalism course which was aimed at recruiting and training people to spread propaganda against Iran".
Imprisonment
For the next few years, Zaghari-Ratcliffe remained a prisoner of the Iranian state. For the first few months, she was kept in solitary confinement in Kerman Prison – something she later told BBC Woman’s Hour is “the most hostile, quiet form of torture”.
She was kept in a 1x2m cell, with no windows and lights that were kept on 24/7.
“I think solitary confinement works in the way they can mess your mind up in a way to break you,” she said. “There is a reason they keep people in solitary and that is to force them to confess to things they haven't done and that works.”
Later, she was transferred to Evin Prison, where she was also put in solitary before being released onto the ward.
At the same time, her husband Richard was desperately trying to get her released – not easy, given that in 2017 Boris Johnson also made his ill-judged remarks to a Foreign Affairs Committee that Zaghari-Ratcliffe was “teaching people journalism” in Iran.
This, she later told BBC Women’s Hour, helped Iranian authorities construct a narrative that she was in the country to spy.
“For about a year and a half, I was trying to say: 'Look I was on holiday... I have come with a baby with a suitcase full of nappies,’” she said. “But then when he made that comment, the Revolutionary Guards every time after that... they said: 'You have been hiding information from us. We know that you're a spy. We know what you were up to, even your prime minister mentioned that.'
“So I lived under the shadow of his comment psychologically and emotionally for the following four-and-a-half years after that day.”
Legal disputes
Life in Evin was hard. “One of our main challenges in prison was time,” Zaghari-Ratcliffe said during a lecture for the Longford Trust.
“We were relentlessly struggling to find ways to improve the quality of the time we spent in prison. The authorities were exceptionally reluctant to provide us with options, but we found ways to overcome that. I have spent time with women in Evin who had 10 or more years of sentence, served graciously and with dignity.
“They were strong pillars in the ward, helping others, including myself, to go through those hard times of desperation. By sticking together, we each increased our chances of surviving. We read together, entertained each other, cooked and ate together, exercised together and fought together. We were stronger together.”
In the meantime, back at home, her husband Richard was attempting to move the government dial on taking action on the case. In 2016, he set up a petition urging the UK government and Iran’s supreme leader to return his wife and daughter; by 2019, this had gained more than 3.5m signatories across 155 countries.
He also alleged that the reason she was imprisoned was due to a notorious debt the UK owed to Iran, which dated back to the 1970s.
Back in 1971, the Iranian government paid the UK for more than 1,500 chieftain tanks. When the Shah’s regime fell in 1979, Britain cancelled part of the order, leaving the Iranian government (they claimed) £450m in debt.
In October 2019, Ratcliffe said that the UK was using “every legal roadblock to delay and minimise the payment”.
Hunger strikes
Both Ratcliffes were prepared to go to extreme lengths to make their voices heard. In June 2019, they went on hunger strike in protest against the prison sentence – Nazanin in Evin, and Richard camping outside the Iranian embassy. They both ended this first strike after 15 days.
In 2021, Richard went on a second hunger strike to incite the government to try harder in securing Nazanin’s release. This lasted 21 days, in which he camped outside the Foreign Office – and which he was forced to end, saying their daughter “needs two parents”.
In the meantime, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was forced to endure life in prison. In 2020, at the height of the Coronavirus pandemic, she was allowed to leave the prison and stay at her parents’ house on house arrest.
But in 2020, new charges were announced against her – and in April 2021, a month after she was supposed to be released, she was charged to another year in prison for taking part in a demonstration in London 12 years ago, and giving an interview to the BBC Persian service.
“For months, I lived under the terror of being sent back to prison, which luckily never happened, but the ambiguity was always there,” she later said. “The uncertainty of my imprisonment could sometimes push me to the brink... And it didn’t leave me alone in freedom either; for months whilst free, I’d still wake up in the morning pondering whether I was still in Evin.”
Throughout it, Zaghari-Ratcliffe has credited both religion and thoughts of her daughter of getting her through.
“I’ve got a ten-year-old girl called Gabriella, her middle name is Gisou,” she told Harper’s Bazaar during a series on art that has inspired her.
“Gisou in Farsi means plaited hair, in a poetic way. She always had long hair and one of the things I really, really missed when I was in prison was that image in my head that I would one day be free and I would plait her hair.”
Freedom
Finally, on March 16, 2022, Zaghari-Ratcliffe was released, along with fellow British-Iranian hostage Anoosheh Ashoori. They spent the night in Muscat and arrived in the United Kingdom the next day, where she was reunited with her family for the first time in years.
She described the moment of coming back as “euphoric,” but added it “wasn’t easy. Being away for a long time made re-engaging with society much more complicated than expected. I came back feeling prison had wasted my life. I couldn’t change what was passed. I had to come to terms with it.”
Why was she released? It’s never been clear, but it’s been theorised that the decision was linked to the UK’s decision to pay £393.8m of their arms deal debt – though the Iranian government has denied this. Other contributing factors certainly involve Richard’s tireless campaigning, British diplomacy and the advent of the Ukrainian war.
These days, Zaghari-Ratcliffe lives with her family in London, effectively in exile from Iran. It’s clear that this weighs on her mind – especially regarding the protests that broke out across the country in 2022 after the death of Mahsa Amini.
“I was forced to live in exile after I left prison and came back to the UK, but the thing I really, really miss is my country,” she told Harper’s Bazaar. “Even though I live far from Iran now, my heart beats every single day for what happens in my country.”
Prisoner 951 airs on BBC One from November 23
