Brit mum jailed in Iran ‘was suicidal and forced to wear a hood during interrogations’, fellow captor claims
BRIT mum jailed in Iran was suicidal and forced to wear a hood during interrogations, a fellow captor has claimed.
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 38, was sentenced to 5 years in a notorious prison in Tehran in 2016 for allegedly trying to topple the Iranian regime.
She now faces a further five years after Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson incorrectly claimed that she was in the country training journalists, when she was in fact on holiday.
Her husband Richard Ratcliffe has said he is due to speak to Mr Johnson tomorrow and wants the Foreign Secretary to join him on his next trip to Iran.
The gaffe was seized on by Iranian TV as proof of her illegal activity, and has led to calls for Boris to resign.
Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe has already spent months in solitary confinement at the prison and has been treated so badly she has been losing her hair and had suicidal thoughts, reports.
Inmates said that the mum-of-one wept uncontrollably after being separated from her baby daughter Gabriella.
Homa Hoodfar, 66, a Canadian American who spent two days in jail with Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe in June, told the paper: “Her hair was falling out, huge clumps of it covered our blankets.
“She was crying about her daughter who was going to celebrate her second birthday. She just talked about her little girl and cried.”
Mrs Hoodfar, who teaches anthropology at Concordia University, Montreal, said that detainees were marched into interrogation rooms in hoods and screamed at.
She said: “Their strategy is to try to break their prisoners and make them cry."
Mr Ratcliffe said that even her mother and daughter were forced to wear hoods during their initial family visits at the horror prison.
The horrible conditions she is living in have made her depressed, and her family fear she could be at risk of suicide if the Iranian government follows through with its threat to double her sentence, following Boris Johnson's statement.
He refuses to apologise.
Allies of the Foreign Secretary blame the Foreign Office for the gaff, saying he had been briefed incorrectly.
Mrs Hoodfar's claims come after a former inmate of the same Iranian prison described it as a "black hole of human-made evil" where women are regularly tortured.
Marina Nemat was held for two years in Evin prison in Tehran in 1982 when she was just 16, after being accused of criticising the Iranian regime.
In an , she revealed that she was regularly tortured by guards who lashed her bare feet with cables.
Ms Nemat, now in her 50s and living in Canada, fears that torture still takes place in the prison, but offered hope to the Brit saying that "she just needs to hang in there because it will come to an end".
Accusations of sexual assault, violence and beatings have plagued the prison for years and a photographer was reportedly beaten to death there in 2003.
Amnesty International has previously condemned Evin for denying its inmates food and medical care.
Britain’s ambassador to Iran, Nicholas Hopton, yesterday tweeted that the "UK government has no doubt Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was on holiday in Iran when she was arrested last year" in an effort to clear up any confusion.
The Sun understands that the ambassador’s tweet in Farsi and English was sent following a personal request from Richard Ratcliffe, the husband of Nazanin.
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