The passport of British aid worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who has been detained in Iran for the last six years, was returned to her Tuesday and on Wednesday she was “at the airport in Tehran and on her way home,” according to British lawmaker Tulip Siddiq.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe was arrested in April 2016 while visiting her parents in Iran with her British-born daughter, Gabriella, who is now seven years old. She has not seen her husband in person since 2016, according to the BBC. She was working as a project manager for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charity arm of the news agency, at the time of her arrest. She was convicted of “propaganda against the system,” and plotting to overthrow the clerical establishment.
She spent nearly five years in an Iranian jail and another year under house arrest, in part for attending a demonstration outside the Iranian embassy in London and being interviewed by the BBC Persian network more than a decade ago. She was released from house arrest a year ago but immediately called back to court over new propaganda charges, for which she was sentenced to another year in prison and a one-year ban on leaving the country after the end of the prison term.
The return of Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s passport could be due to progress in talks over Iran’s claims that the United Kingdom owes it hundreds of millions of that Iran’s shah for military vehicles and equipment, most of which was not delivered after the Islamic Revolution of 1979.