British-Iranian ends 15-day hunger strike in Tehran jail

LONDON: A British-Iranian mother jailed in Tehran since 2016 on sedition charges she denies has ended her hunger strike after 15 days, her husband said on Saturday.Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s husband, Richard Ratcliffe, told BBC Radio that his wife had eaten some porridge with apple and banana."I’m relieved because I wouldn’t have wanted her to push it much longer," said Ratcliffe, who also went without food for 15 days in solidarity with his wife.Ratcliffe had spent much of that time picketing Iran’s embassy in London, urging whoever is to succeed outgoing Prime Minister Theresa May to make his wife’s case a priority.Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 40, began refusing food to mark her daughter Gabriella’s fifth birthday.Tulip Siddiq, who is the Labour MP for Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s consituency, expressed relief at the news and said it “shames those in power that they had to go through that torture in the first place”.The former cabinet minister Andrea Leadsom tweeted: “It is heart breaking that this couple are still apart, and their daughter is still unable to be with her mother. UK is doing everything possible to see them reunited.”During Ratcliffe’s hunger strike, the pavement outside the embassy turned into a hub of protest, with hundreds of cards and messages decorating a large corrugate iron barrier erected in an attempt to block him off.

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