British-Iranian aid worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe on Monday thanked everyone involved in the campaign to secure her release from detention in Iran, but was critical of UK diplomatic efforts over the years to get her out.     

"What's happened now should have happened six years ago. ... I shouldn't have been in prison for six years," she said.

"The meaning of freedom is never going to be complete (until) such time that all of us who are unjustly detained in Iran are reunited with our families," she added.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe was speaking publicly for the first time since her release this month.  

Morad Tahbaz, another British-Iranian environmental campaigner who also has a US passport, is still being held in Iran.

"He should have been on the same flight and it should happen to the other dual nationals," Zaghari-Ratcliffe said, adding that she understood what he is going through after several false hopes.

Tahbaz's sister said earlier on Monday that he had gone on hunger strike, accusing the UK government of abandoning him.

"We've only just found out before we started this afternoon that he's been returned to the prison," his daughter Roxanne Tahbaz said at the news conference.

Why was Zaghari-Ratcliffe held in Iran?

Zaghari-Ratcliffe was held in Iran for six years after she was arrested in April 2016 with her daughte,r Gabriella, then aged just 1, at Tehran's airport.

She was convicted of plotting to overthrow the Iranian government, separated from her daughter and had her British passport confiscated. 

She, along with her supporters and human rights groups, have always denied the allegations leveled against her.  

The aid worker was sentenced to an extra 12 months in prison in 2021, on charges of spreading "propaganda against the system" after it emerged that she had participated in a protest outside the Iranian Embassy in London in 2009. 

After a tireless campaign for her release, Zaghari-Ratcliffe was finally freed and allowed to leave Iran this month.  

The 43-year-old landed in the United Kingdom on March 17, together with fellow freed British-Iranian Anoosheh Ashoori.  

The high-profile release of Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Ashoori came as the UK paid nearly £400 million ($523 million, €474 million) to settle a debt dating to the 1970s amid signs of a potential thaw in Iran's relations with the West. 

Dual nationals still in prison in Iran

The British government never officially linked her detention to what it owed but, soon after her release was announced, London said it had settled the outstanding bill. 

A number of dual nationals from Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Sweden and the United States have been arrested by Iranian authorities.

Family members and human rights activists accuse Tehran of arresting them on trumped-up charges to squeeze concessions from Western nations.

sri/rt (AFP, Reuters)