British Council employee Aras Amiri returns to the UK after being released from Iranian prison

[ad_1]

Today, Wednesday, the organization said that British Council employee Aras Amiri has returned to the United Kingdom, after her release from an Iranian prison where she was serving a 10-year prison sentence on suspected spying charges.

The Iranian authorities did not immediately acknowledge the release of the Iranian citizen, who was arrested in March 2018 while visiting his family in Iran and accused of spying for the British government.

The British Council said, on Wednesday, that her lawyer’s appeal to the Iranian Supreme Court had been successful.

“We have always refuted the original charges against Aras,” the council said in a statement. “We are very proud of her work in our London office as Arts Program Officer to support a greater understanding and appreciation of Iranian culture in the UK.”

Amiri was sentenced in May 2019 to 10 years in prison for working for British intelligence. Iran’s Supreme Court rejected an earlier appeal in August and upheld her sentence.

But the court then found that her previous conviction of espionage in the country’s revolutionary court was “against Sharia” or Islamic law, her lawyer, Hojja Kermani, told The Associated Press.

Kermani said his client had been released from prison in recent months but remained in Iran until Monday when she challenged the travel ban.

Amiri’s release comes as Tehran is negotiating in Vienna with world powers including the United Kingdom over a return to the 2015 nuclear deal, from which the United States unilaterally withdrew in 2018.

Iran still holds many British-Iranian dual nationals, which a rights group says amounts to hostage diplomacy as Iran seeks to repay £400m of 1970s debt owed by the United Kingdom.

Among those arrested is Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian employee of the Thomson Reuters Foundation who has been held in Iran for more than five years.

After she finished her sentence last year, she was released from prison – only for authorities to file new charges of “spreading propaganda against the system” that they vehemently deny.

Anoush Ashouri, another British-Iranian national, was sentenced to 12 years in prison at the same time as Ms. Amiri and remains under arrest.

.

[ad_2]