Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe spent her first night with her husband Richard and daughter Gabriella in six years, as they slept together in the same bed after returning to the UK.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 43, a British-Iranian aid worker, arrived back in the UK shortly after 1am on a flight from Muscat in Oman.
She was reunited with her husband and seven-year-old daughter in a reception building at the airfield at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire. Gabriella shouted “Mummy!” as she watched her walk down the steps from the plane.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori, 67, who is also British-Iranian and was released with her, were then taken to a safe house with their families.
A source said that Zaghari-Ratcliffe and her family will stay in the safe house until at least the beginning of next week.
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Barbara Ratcliffe said that her daughter-in-law was doing “just fine”.
She said: “We watched the plane the whole way home on a flight tracker. But we did not let ourselves be jubilant until she got on the plane in Oman.
“Well I didn’t until she was over the English Channel.”
Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s sister-in-law told BBC Radio 4’s Today that Gabriella had slept with her parents. “Gabriella slept between Richard and Nazanin last night for the first time in six years.”
She said that they were going to need some initial space to “try and work to each others rhythms”.
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“They’re not going to go back to where they were before. They’re never going to be a normal family. They’ve been living apart for such a long time,” she said. “There’s an element of having these normal experiences they haven’t been able to: going swimming together, going to supermarkets, going for walks, all those things that the rest of us take for granted.”
The reunion is the first time that Ratcliffe has seen his wife in person since he waved her and their daughter goodbye at Gatwick airport’s departure gate in 2016 as they left for a holiday.
After Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s arrest in 2016, Gabriella remained with her maternal grandparents in Iran, where she forgot how to speak English and occasionally visited her mother in prison.
She returned to the UK in 2019, accompanied by Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s brother, Mohammed, who has lived the family in their two-bedroom West Hampstead flat ever since.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe spent six years in detention after being convicted of plotting to overthrow the Iran’s clerical establishment.
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She was freed yesterday alongside Ashoori, a retired civil engineer, after Britain agreed to pay a decades-old debt of £393.8 million to Iran relating to a contract for undelivered Chieftain tanks. It said that the money would be ring-fenced for humanitarian purposes.
Tulip Siddiq, the Labour MP who has campaigned for Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s release, said that Gabriella had struggled to believe that her mother was coming home.
“When she heard Mummy was coming home she thought her father was joking. She said to her dad, ‘You’re pulling my leg.’ She reconfirmed with me when she saw me yesterday and said, ‘Is it true mummy’s coming home?’ My heart just broke. Then she started playing the piano and singing and dancing. That was lovely.”
Richard Ratcliffe, 45, told The Times that he and his wife and were looking forward to “the beginning of a new life” together, adding: “There’s no solace in looking backwards at the time we’ve lost.”
On his way to the airfield last night Ratcliffe said: “It will be baby steps. She has been sad and depressed a lot of the time. Learning to be happy again is probably actually where we start as a family.
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“It will be a process . . . we will take it one day at a time. It is the beginning of a new life and hopefully a happy one.”
He revealed that on Sunday his wife had been summoned to Iran’s intelligence ministry and given her British and Iranian passports. Officials from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps “put the fear of God in her” and said: “You need to tread very carefully and your husband needs to tread carefully.”
Ratcliffe said: “They said, ‘If you co-operate you’re going to be on a plane tomorrow’, and so she co-operated.”
Zaghari-Ratcliffe endured an agonising wait while the debt transaction was finalised. Only when the flight from Tehran to Muscat took off did it feel “like a weight being lifted”, Ratcliffe said.
In a video filmed by Elika, the daughter of Ashoori, the families can be seen inside the airport watching through the window the moment their loved ones stepped off the plane.
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“Is that Mummy?” asks Gabriella as Zaghari-Ratcliffe walks down the steps, shortly followed by Ashoori. “That’s my dad,” Elika says excitedly, as the pair getting off the plane waved for the photographers gathered at the airbase.
Gabriella soon realises. “Mummy!” she says. “That’s Mummy,” she repeats, while her dad confirms that it’s true.
As Zaghari-Ratcliffe steps into arrivals her husband can be seen pointing and waving to her, alerting their daughter, who instantly runs towards her for a hug. Though the view is then obscured, cries of happiness can be heard from Zaghari-Ratcliffe.
“You smell nice,” Gabriella can be heard saying as her mum hugs her and kisses her. “Do I smell nice? I haven’t had a shower.” “Nice for Daddy,” Ratcliffe jokes.
For the Ashoori family, each takes it turns to hug their dad, with one capturing the moment on his phone. The families, whose lives and pain have been intertwined for years, are then formally introduced. “That’s my dad,” Elika tells Gabriella as he bends down to give her a hug.
Also present were Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, and other Foreign Office officials. One person who was with them on the flight informs the others of their journey: “They were such good company on the plane, we thought they might not want to talk too much and just want to sleep but they’ve been really good company.”
Terry Waite, who was held as a hostage in Lebanon for four years from 1987, offered his advice for the family on how they should cope.
“My advice is to take it gently . . . When you come out of a situation like that, take it as though you’re coming up from the seabed. If you come up too quickly you get the bends. If you come out gently, you’ll be fine,” he said speaking to the BBC.
Waite, 82, who has been speaking to Zaghari-Ratcliffe over the past year, added: “It is absolutely essential that after the first exposure they then take it easy, they then withdraw, and I think Richard has this message, he realises it’s important.
“To be quite honest it took me about 12 months to really get back into life because the whole experience through which they’ve passed has to be processed and sometimes people need professional help for that.”
James Cleverly, a minister in the Foreign Office, denied that Boris Johnson owed Zaghari-Ratcliffe an apology.
In 2017 Johnson, then foreign secretary, told a committee of MPs that Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been training journalists in Iran. His comments were used by Iran to justify her detention.
Asked whether the prime minister should apologise, Cleverly told Times Radio: “The Iranian regime have demonstrated a willingness to apply completely arbitrary and meaningless charges.
“The simple truth of the matter is it was always within their gift to release Nazanin and Anoosheh and Morad [Tahbaz] and others, they chose not to. They are the sole party responsible for the suffering these people have endured in the last few years.”
He said he had “absolutely no doubt that [Johnson’s] comments made no difference”.
Cleverly said Iran’s place in the world could be reviewed and sanctions could be lifted in the wake of the release of Zaghari-Ratcliffe. There has been a “change in tone” as soon as the new Iranian government was elected last year.
“I would hope that Iran sees that a shift in their behaviour can bring about positive changes, but ultimately they are the ones responsible for this. And if they were to change their behaviour, then the international posture towards them could be reviewed.”
