Nazanin to go back before Iranian court to face new charges – linked to Johnson’s blunder
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe: this wrongly-jailed woman has become a pawn in an international power struggle.
And that country’s officials have taken great pleasure in letting us know that her plight is due to blundering Boris Johnson, the UK’s prime muppet.
Johnson was the idiot who blurted out in Parliament – in 2017, when he was Foreign Secretary – that Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been “training journalists”.
She had been doing nothing of the kind.
A project manager with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, she had been doing nothing more sinister than visiting her family for the Persian New Year celebration when she was arrested in 2016.
But the Iranian authorities seized on Johnson’s idiotic remark and threatened to use it to add five more years to her five-year prison sentence.
Now – three years after Johnson misspoke, it seems they have decided to follow through on the threat:
Richard Ratcliffe said his wife will appear in court on Sunday accused of “spreading propaganda against the regime” in Iran.
Apparently that’s how they describe the teaching of journalism – which she wasn’t doing in any event.
Of course we all know that Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s imprisonment has more to do with the £400 million that the UK government owes to Iran.
It could not be paid before because of international sanctions – but when Boris Johnson’s career was in danger, it seems such concerns evaporated.
How contrary, then, for us to find that the money has not been paid, apparently because Johnson doesn’t want to upset Donald Trump.
Johnson, it seems, wanted to wait until after the US presidential election on November 3 because he wanted to know whether Trump would still be US president before taking action.
So the Iranian decision to go back to court now has put him in a particularly sticky situation.
Will he pay up and get Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe back?
Or will he delay, to stay on the right side of Donald Trump?
I think we all know the answer to that. Johnson is the runt of international politics.
When powerful people squabble, it is always the innocents who suffer.
Source: New Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe charges linked to Boris Johnson’s infamous gaffe – Mirror Online
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