Foreign Minister Boris Johnson said Britain would appeal to Iran on humanitarian grounds to free a jailed aid worker but expressed reservations that granting her diplomatic protection would help secure her release, her husband said yesterday.
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a project manager with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, was sentenced to five years in prison after being convicted by an Iranian court of plotting to overthrow the establishment. She denies the charges.
Johnson came under pressure to resign after comments he made earlier this month that Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been teaching people journalism before her arrest in April 2016.
Critics said the comments might have prompted Iran to extend her sentence and he apologised for his remarks on Monday.
The Thomson Reuters Foundation, a charity organisation that is independent of Thomson Reuters and operates independently of Reuters News, said Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been on holiday and had not been teaching journalism in Iran.
Yesterday, Johnson met her husband Richard Ratcliffe and told him Britain would leave no stone unturned in its bid to free her, saying the British ambassador in Tehran had earlier raised her case again with the Iranian authorities.
Johnson also stressed the importance of an appeal on humanitarian grounds, Ratcliffe told reporters, saying it had been a positive meeting.
But officials had questioned whether it would help to grant his wife diplomatic protection — a move that would explicitly make Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s fate an issue in state-to-state relations rather than a purely consular case.


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