Jailed Europeans raise fears of virus in Iran's prisons

DUBAI - Jailed British-Iranian charity worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is in good health, Iran's judiciary spokesman claimed on Tuesday, after her husband said on Saturday he believed she had contracted the coronavirus in prison.

Iran has had the highest number of deaths from coronavirus outside of China, where the virus originated, and so far there have been 77 deaths and 2,336 people infected, the health ministry said on Tuesday. Activists, Iranians on social media and Persian-language news agencies dispute those figures, saying the Iranian government is downplaying the scale of the outbreak.

Iranian officials have, however, acknowledged concerns about a possible outbreak in prisons, and the judiciary has already released hundreds of non-political prisoners temporarily over fears that the coronavirus could spread.

"Mrs. Nazanin Zaghari, we looked into it and she is in good health," judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Esmaili said. "Yesterday, she had contact with her family and told them about her good health."

On Saturday, Zaghari-Ratcliffe's husband Richard Ratcliffe said campaigners believed she had contracted the coronavirus in Tehran's Evin prison, where she is being held.

"We are concerned by the prison authorities' refusal to test her, and the wider suppression of coronavirus inside the Iranian prison system," he said.

According to reports in Iranian news media, Hengameh Shahidi, an activist who had been held in the same cell as Zaghari-Ratcliffe, was being temporarily released after she had been coughing and complaining she was ill in recent days.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a project manager with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, was arrested in April 2016 at a Tehran airport as she headed back to Britain with her daughter after a family visit.

She was sentenced to five years in jail after being convicted of plotting to overthrow Iran's clerical establishment. Her family and the foundation, a charity that operates independently of media firm Thomson Reuters and its news subsidiary Reuters, deny the charge.

Ratcliffe set up the "Free Nazanin" campaign group and has lobbied the UK government to secure his wife's release from prison, but those calls have so far been dismissed by Tehran. There has been heavy political pressure in the UK to push for Zaghari-Ratcliffe's release since the coronavirus began spreading rapidly in Iran.

British lawmaker Tulip Siddiq said Zaghari-Ratcliffe had told her family she had not been tested for coronavirus. She also said there was a possibility that she may be temporarily let out of Evin prison.

"News from Iranian Ambassador that my constituent Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe may be released on furlough today or tomorrow from prison in Iran. If this is true, Nazanin would welcome leaving Evin jail, but we've been here before," Siddiq said in a tweet.

She said the British government was obliged to ensure that any temporary release was made permanent "and not let her be used as a bargaining chip in the weeks to come".

Zaghari-Ratcliffe has taken furlough from prison once before, but has since rejected further offers as she found returning to prison after her temporary freedom too traumatic.

'Masquerade of justice'

Iran's claims about Zaghari-Ratcliffe's situation came as two French academics, jailed in Iran for over half a year on national security charges, went on trial Tuesday in a case that has raised tensions between Tehran and Paris.

Fariba Adelkhah, 60, and Roland Marchal, 64, both researchers at Sciences Po University in Paris, were detained in June on charges that rights groups and fellow academics have denounced as outrageous.

Only Adelkhah appeared in the closed-door hearing of the Revolutionary Court in Tehran, according to information passed on to their lawyer Said Dehghan. According to Dehghan, the hearing was postponed to an unspecified date, and the judge refused a defence request that two additional lawyers be allowed to represent them.

Adelkhah, an anthropologist and expert on Shiite Islam, faces charges of "propaganda against the system" and "colluding to commit acts against national security".

Her colleague Marchal, a specialist on East Africa, is accused of the same national security charge, said the lawyer.

Their Paris-based support group and the French foreign ministry have sounded the alarm over the health of the two - Adelkhah went on hunger strike for 49 days and Marchal's health is said to be deteriorating. The support group denounced as a "masquerade of justice" the closed-door hearing presided over by Judge Fazlollah Salavati, adding that holding the two in jail was particularly dangerous given the intensity of the coronavirus outbreak in Iran.

"The Iranian authorities are deliberately putting in danger the lives of our two colleagues - already weakened - by keeping them in an overcrowded jail while the country is hit by a serious coronavirus epidemic whose scale is being played down and which is not under control," it said.

Iran does not recognise Adelkhah's dual French-Iranian nationality and has lashed out at Paris for what it has described as "interference" in the cases.

Adelkhah and Marchal are not the only academics being held by Tehran, which has been accused by the West of arbitrarily detaining foreigners as bargaining chips.

Australian Kylie Moore-Gilbert of the University of Melbourne is serving a 10-year sentence after being found guilty of espionage.

Tehran is still holding several other foreigners in high-profile cases, including Iranian-American businessman Siamak Namazi and his father, Mohammad Bagher Namazi.