Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s boss has condemned Boris Johnson for committing a “huge, huge gaffe” after incorrectly suggesting the British mother jailed in Iran is a journalist who was training other reporters.
The Foreign Secretary today apologised for his mistake after Iran state TV used his comments to support the regime’s trumped-up charge she was in the country spying.
The Government has now fully adopted Nazanin’s family’s position, namely that she was in the country on holiday visiting her parents with her baby daughter.
But it appears Johnson’s words are hard to reverse.
Nazanin works for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the Canadian news agency Thomson Reuters’s charitable arm, as a project manager, not a journalist.
It issued a statement in response to the Iranian TV reports, reiterating that she had never taken part in the training of journalists - as Johnson had suggested.
But when being interviewed by Sky News’s Kay Burley in the aftermath of Johnson’s apology to Parliament, the foundation’s chief executive, Monique Villa, was asked about Nazanin “going on holiday as a journalist”.
Burley: “I have two more questions for you, given that she is a journalist and has gone on holiday, but she is a journalist ...
Villa: “No, no, no no ...”
Burley: “She is not a journalist?”
Villa: “She has never been a journalist. She’s a project manager. She is the person that organises the logistics of workshops. She has not trained journalists because, she had never been a journalist. We have other journalists doing that. It is completely an invention. It has never existed.”
Burley: “I wonder where Boris got that from. It seems almost unbelievable that he could come up with this suggestion that she is a journalist.”
Villa: “It’s an enormous blow, he must have forgotten about her and thought Thomson Reuters they are journalists ... I have no idea how he could commit this mistake. It’s really a huge, huge gaffe. She has never been a journalist and at the foundation we only have journalists training other journalists, of course.”
Nazanin has been in jail 19 months, and her husband revealed on Sunday that she is “on the verge of a nervous breakdown” after finding lumps on her breasts.
“Nazanin was holiday, as we have repeated for 19 months now. It has taken a huge gaffe from Boris Johnson last week for people to really understand it is a serious issue for the British government,” said Villa.
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