UK calls on Iran to release dual national

LONDON: The UK government on Sunday called for the immediate release of a British-Iranian woman after her five-year sentence for sedition ended in Tehran.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who has been under house arrest for months, has had her ankle tag removed, her local MP in London said. But the 42-year-old dual national now faces another court date in Iran next Sunday, dashing hopes from her family, friends and colleagues of an immediate return home.

British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said the government in London welcomed the fact she was no longer electronically tagged. But he called her treatment by the authorities "intolerable".

"She must be allowed to return to the UK as soon as possible to be reunited with her family," he wrote on Twitter. Zaghari-Ratcliffe was detained in Iran in 2016 and convicted of plotting to overthrow the regime in Tehran -- accusations she strenuously denied. But her case, and those of other dual nationals, became the centre of a diplomatic dispute during the five years she has been separated from her husband, Richard, and their young daughter.