Iran: lengthy jail terms for dual national and British Council worker
A British Council employee and a dual British-Iranian
national have been sentenced to lengthy prison terms on security and spying
charges by Iran.
Aras Amiri, an Iranian national and British Council
worker who had been living in London, was arrested in 2018 during a trip to
Iran to visit relatives. A judiciary spokesman said on Tuesday that an appeals
court had upheld a 10-year jail sentence against her.
The spokesman identified a second convicted woman as
Anousheh Ashouri, a dual British-Iranian national. She was sentenced to 12
years for ties to Israel’s Mossad spy agency.
The spokesman said a man, Ali Johari, had also been
given a 12-year sentence. Johari allegedly passed on information about
construction projects by a Revolutionary Guards-affiliated construction
conglomerate, Khatam al-Anbia.
Britain said it was supporting Ashouri’s family and
that the UK embassy in Tehran was continuing to request consular access. “The
treatment of all dual nationals detained in Iran is a priority and we raise
their cases at the most senior levels,” a Foreign Office spokesman said in a
statement. “We urge Iran to let them be reunited with their families.”
The verdicts came amid tensions between Iran and US
ally Britain over the seizure of oil tankers in recent weeks.
An Iranian tanker was seized off the British
overseas territory of Gibraltar on 4 July on suspicion of shipping oil to Syria
in breach of EU sanctions.
That vessel has been released but Iran continues to
hold a British-flagged tanker it seized in the Gulf on 19 July for breaking
“international maritime rules”.
Tensions had already been strained between the two
countries over the fate of the British-Iranian woman Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe,
who was arrested by Iranian authorities in 2016 as she was leaving Tehran.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who worked for the Thomson
Reuters Foundation, was put on trial and is serving a five-year jail sentence
for allegedly trying to topple the Iranian government.
