LONDON: A former Finnish-Iranian dual national who was jailed alongside high-profile British-Iranian prisoner Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has been offered a scholarship at Oxford University, four years after being released through UK diplomatic efforts.
Ana Diamond, now a British-Finnish dual national, spent 200 days in solitary confinement aged 19 in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, in the same wing as Zaghari-Ratcliffe.
Diamond faced the death penalty after being charged with spying when customs authorities on arrival found images on her laptop of her attending UK political events.
Evin prison guards subjected her to brutal interrogation techniques. “They would say that the only place I would graduate from would be Evin University,” she said.
But Diamond, now 24, proved her Iranian jailers wrong this week after graduating with a first from King’s College and receiving a scholarship to study for a postgraduate degree in modern Persian studies at Oxford University.
She said Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who is still under house arrest in Iran, had emailed her with a message of “grace and kindness.”
Richard Ratcliffe, who is seeking to organize his wife’s return to the UK, said the scholarship has “brought his family hope.”
Diamond said: “This is the beginning of a new chapter. My success demonstrates how dreams cannot be chained, stolen or put in exile. The guards were wrong.”
Two years after she was jailed in 2015, then-UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson visited Iran urging hostage releases, resulting in all charges against Diamond being dropped.
The UK provided her with an emergency passport and she fled Iran, but has suffered long-term post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and heart problems. Diamond has since helped Ratcliffe campaign for his wife’s release.
Ratcliffe, who has not seen his wife in person since 2015, praised Diamond. “How she has been able to rebuild her life, across the continuing ups and downs and the shadows of Evin, is a reminder that with perseverance, and the care of many other people, Nazanin can learn to feel the sun again when there’s a break in the clouds,” he said.
