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TEHRAN (FNA)- Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said that his country has recently received its $530mln money from London after over 40 years.
The British government recently paid the 390-million-pound ($530mln) debt after more than 40 years of delay and following long-running negotiations, Khatibzadeh said on Wednesday.
He added that London had unfortunately tied paying its debt to political issues
Khatibzadeh also said that the Islamic Republic has never retracted its stance on upholding the rights of the Iranian people.
The foreign ministry spokesman noted that Iran’s Judiciary released from prison two British-Iranian nationals Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anousheh Ashouri based on humanitarian considerations and on the threshold of the upcoming Islamic festivities.
Khatibzadeh said the pair were serving their sentences based on an Iranian court ruling and they were released before their jail terms were completed.
The diplomat stressed that the release of the two detainees had no connection with the debt the British government paid.
He explained that Tehran and London reached an agreement last summer over the payment of the debt, but Britain later refused to implement the document it had signed with Iran.
Khatibzadeh also said another detainee Morad Tahbaz has also been released on furlough, and thanked Oman for having a constructive role in this regard.
Iranian-American Tahbaz was sentenced to ten years in jail in November 2019 for cooperating with the US government.
Both Ashouri and Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been jailed for involvement in espionage activities against Iran.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Ashouri were freed on Wednesday in return for the release of an Iranian national and after Tehran received its long-awaited $530mln debt from Britain.
Before their release, Britain paid $530 million (400 million pounds) to Iran, to settle a debt related to an unfulfilled military contract that dates back to before the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran.
There is no further information on the Iranian national that has been released in the exchange.
Ashouri, who previously lived in Southeast London with his family, was detained in August 2017 and was sentenced to 10 years in prison for cooperating with Israel’s spy agency Mossad and two years for obtaining 33,000 euros in “illicit funds” nearly a year later.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 43, had been found guilty of plotting to orchestrate a soft overthrow of the Islamic Republic and has been in jail since 2016.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a project manager with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, was arrested in Tehran in April 2016 as she was returning to Britain.
While the British media have claimed that she was arrested after a family visit and not on any mission, former British Foreign Secretary and current Prime Minister Boris Johnson disclosed in remarks to a parliamentary committee that Zaghari-Ratcliffe was "simply teaching people journalism as I understand it" when she was arrested at Tehran airport.
Back in October 2017, the prosecutor general of Tehran stated that she was being held for running “a BBC Persian online journalism course which was aimed at recruiting and training people to spread propaganda against Iran”.
Britain has delayed the payment for many years citing problems faced because of foreign sanctions against Iran.
However, Tehran has insisted the debt should be settled regardless of issues that exist between Iran and the West.
The money is owed to Iran over an upfront payment made by the former Shah of Iran to Britain to buy 1,750 Chieftain tanks and other military vehicles.
Johnson on Tuesday declined to comment on Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s case and whether there have been direct talks on the debt issue in Tehran although he admitted that talks on consular cases have been going on for a long time.
Later in the day, British lawmaker Tulip Siddiq said Zaghari-Ratcliffe has had her British passport returned.
“I am very pleased to say that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has been given her British passport back,” Siddiq said on Twitter