As the aircraft was being prepared to bring back British political prisoners from Iran this month after years of negotiations, the Tahbaz family were told their nightmare was about to end.
Yet days after their hopes had been raised, Morad Tahbaz had returned to “withering away” in a bleak Iranian prison cell having been caught up in what his relatives call “political chess”.
Roxanne Tahbaz, the daughter of the British-born businessman and conservationist, has accused the British government of abandoning her father, 66.
She said that Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, reneged on a long-promised agreement to secure his release alongside his fellow British-Iranian prisoners Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori.
“I don’t think there is a word that could accurately express how truly let down we feel,” Roxanne, 35, said. “A promise, a deal actually, was made, and was blatantly broken, and the lack of clarity and miscommunication surrounding the entire delivery of it has been shocking.”
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Morad was detained by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard in January 2018 on suspicion of spying while on a trip to visit colleagues at the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation, which he had established years earlier. The father of three was jailed in 2019 over claims that he and his colleagues set up camera traps to track the movements of endangered species such as the Asiatic cheetah as a ruse to monitor missile sites.
Roxanne told how the family began to receive assurances this month from British officials that the saga that had kept Morad in jail had been solved. However, the family were plunged into new turmoil as a plane left Iran two weeks ago with only Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Ashoori on board.
A back-up deal for Morad, who has British, Iranian and American citizenship, to be released on house arrest that was lauded by Truss fell through within 48 hours and he was sent back to prison.
It was only through media reports as the flight home for Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Ashoori was readied that Roxanne found out that her father’s return had been cut out of the agreement. This proved doubly frustrating because it was hoped an agreement would ensure the freedom of Morad’s wife Vida, 61, who cannot leave Iran after her passport was confiscated. “It was heartbreaking,” Roxanne said. “We could feel how happy they felt to be coming home. It is devastating. He was deserted.”
Her father, who has cancer and twice contracted Covid in prison, is on the sixth day of a hunger strike. “At this juncture, he is feeling abandoned because in his mind, his government, his country, has left him behind and he is now sitting withering away feeling quite forsaken,” Roxanne said.
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“To have been let down at the last minute when you are thinking ‘I can’t believe this is happening’ after over four years waiting . . . you are left quite bereft, you don’t know which way is up.”
Britain’s decision to pay a decades-old debt of £393.8 million to Iran relating to a contract for undelivered Chieftain tanks paved the way for the hostage release deal.
Officials said that Iran declined to recognise Tahbaz as a British national and instead saw him as a US citizen, holding him as leverage while talks over a nuclear deal continue.
Although bittersweet to see the other hostages freed, Roxanne disclosed that Zaghari-Ratcliffe and her husband Richard have been quietly helping the Tahbaz family’s fight for justice. “Richard and Nazanin have been incredibly kind and generous with their guidance even in this moment when they haven’t seen each other in years,” she said.
“They call and ask if we need anything else. Richard has kind of forged the way for us and has been a guide on this journey.”
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Born in Hammersmith hospital in west London to a well-respected Iranian family, Tahbaz is the only one of the trio of political prisoners to hold British citizenship through birth, something his family described as “an irony”.
His parents moved back to Tehran for the first few years of his life, before Morad was sent to boarding school in England between the age of four and 16, later moving to the US to study.
After attaining a master’s degree from Columbia University, he became a successful commercial real estate developer, gaining US citizenship through naturalisation. He was eventually able to turn more of his focus to the conservation work that first gripped him when he took out a subscription to National Geographic magazine at the age of nine.
After the trip to Iran in 2018, Morad and Vida had been due to travel to London to see Roxanne, before the family travelled to their holiday home in Costa Rica for a Christmas break.
Roxanne described the moment that she and her siblings, Tara, 33, and Teymoor, 28, who live in the US, heard that their father had been detained in Iran as one of “complete shock”.
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The siblings have not had a proper conversation with their father since and have had to settle for occasionally joining his permitted calls from prison to his wife through a series of relayed speakerphones.
During the snatched conversations, Roxanne said her “ultimate dad” has never complained to them, instead choosing to focus his attention on his children’s lives. “Even when he is there and we are supposed to be strong for him, he is being strong for us,” Roxanne said.
“He has been made into a political pawn and he has been caught in this chess game that everyone is playing,” she said. “He is an unwilling participant in the game. He was there [in Iran] solely for his passion for wildlife and conservation and it has all gone horribly wrong.”
Roxanne said that the trauma had tainted the lives of family members, fearing the situation could be even harder to resolve now Britain has paid the tank debt. “It’s devastating because it feels like loss,” she said. “You almost want to mourn it, but you don’t want to let yourself because you feel like you have to keep hope and faith. So you struggle every day really, because even in the moments that you want to feel happiness, a small part of you is always a bit broken.”
The family initially followed Foreign Office not to talk about their ordeal in public, but have decided to go public over what they see as a broken promise by Boris Johnson and Truss.
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After his short-lived release on furlough last week, a move that Roxanne says the family explicitly warned against, the foreign secretary said that she would “work intensively to secure his departure”.
Roxanne reminded the government that it has a duty to protect British citizens. She said: “We were assured and promised [that he would be released] and I expect and insist that those promises come to fruition, that it wasn’t just words. These are our lives.
“And he is English. It is not acceptable to not follow through.”
In his first interviews since returning, Ashoori, 67, said that he felt “so bitter” that Morad, who he knew from Evin prison, was not on the plane and that he was “not going to be quiet” until his return.
Ashoori described Evin, where he spent five years for trumped-up charges of spying, as the “valley of hell”. The retired engineer told Sky News how he struggled to deal with his detainment, attempting suicide several times and once starving himself for 17 days. Inmates described the beds as “coffins”.
Ashoori said he had found solace through art, making marquetry portraits of Charles Darwin and Patrick Stewart, who supported his cause, and drying flowers for his supporters at home.
A Foreign Office spokesman said: “We are urgently raising Morad’s case with the Iranian authorities. He must be allowed to return to his family’s home in Tehran immediately, as the Iranian government committed to doing.”
