Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s little girl bonds with daughter of man locked up in same Iran jail

The exact moment when Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was reunited with her seven-year-old daughter Gabriella, in the early hours of Thursday morning, was not broadcast on national television. It was too intensely personal for such intrusive scrutiny.

What insights we could glean were documented informally by another daughter — 35-year-old Elika Ashoori, who was sharing the same extraordinary experience as the little girl, as she, too, waited to embrace a beloved parent after years of enforced separation.

Elika’s father, civil engineer Anoosheh Ashoori, 67, was on the same flight back to freedom as Nazanin, after enduring five years in the squalor of Tehran’s notorious Evin jail, where she was also incarcerated; both of them on trumped-up charges of spying which they have always strenuously denied.

It was thanks to Elika’s mobile phone footage that the world caught the words we’d been waiting so many years to hear, since Nazanin was first held captive in Iran in 2016. 

Elika’s father, civil engineer Anoosheh Ashoori, 67, was on the same flight back to freedom as Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, after enduring five years in the squalor of Tehran’s notorious Evin jail, where she was also incarcerated; both of them on trumped-up charges of spying which they have always strenuously denied. (Above, on the plane home from Iran)

‘That’s them now. That’s my mummy!’ Gabriella exclaimed, almost disbelieving, as she glimpsed Nazanin through a window of the RAF airbase at Brize Norton, Oxfordshire, beginning her descent of the plane’s steps with Anoosheh.

And as Gabriella rushed into her mother’s arms — the intimate moment obscured from the camera as they stood behind a screen — we heard, amid the tears, the excited babble of a little girl’s voice.

‘You smell nice,’ Gabriella told her mummy, dissipating the tension as only a child can, before Nazanin replied: ‘Do I? But I haven’t had a shower for 24 hours!’

If Elika knew how Gabriella was feeling, it wasn’t just because of the extraordinary situation they have found themselves in. They may be divided in age by 28 years but during their parents’ enforced absence they have become the firmest of friends, forming a unique bond.

‘When Gabriella first hugged her mum, her whole world was eclipsed into that moment. Everyone else disappeared — which is exactly as it should have been,’ says Elika.

Finally reunited: Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, pictured holding her seven-year-old daughter Gabriella and with her husband Richard, and Anoosheh Ashoori with family members including his daughter Elika after landing in the UK

‘I’m so very glad that void in her world where her mum should have been is now filled. And when they cuddled each other, no one would have dreamt of intruding on that sacred moment.

‘Just as when I hugged my dad for the first time in five years, the world around me didn’t exist. I was in a bubble. It was very emotional. We are not the type of family who cry, but it was an extraordinary situation.’

She recalls how she and her brother stood back so their parents could have the first moment together. 

‘We let them hug and they were both in tears. It was only the second time in my life that I’d seen my dad cry. The last time was 25 years ago when our family dog died. Then seconds later I was hugging him.’

She adds: ‘It’s amazing how quickly you switch back into the everyday world,’ describing how they went on to discuss his flight — he’d enjoyed visiting the cockpit and showed them the David Attenborough magazine he’d been reading — ‘which was such a Dad thing to do,’ she says with a laugh.

As Gabriella rushed into her mother’s arms — the intimate moment obscured from the camera as they stood behind a screen — we heard, amid the tears, the excited babble of a little girl’s voice. ‘You smell nice,’ Gabriella told her mummy, dissipating the tension as only a child can, before Nazanin replied: ‘Do I? But I haven’t had a shower for 24 hours!’

‘We kept the conversation light. We know the conditions in prison were awful. There were rats and cockroaches; there was always light and noise. 

‘There were 15 people in Dad’s cell, and to be coming home to a warm, comfortable bed must have been unbelievable for him. But there is a time for discussing those deeper things and it wasn’t then.

‘And while we were with Dad, Nazanin was hugging Gabriella, holding her so tight and speaking to her in Persian, but Gabriella was saying, ‘I don’t understand.’

‘She sounds like a little girl who was brought up in London now, but when she first came back to England three years ago she could only speak Persian.’

Nazanin and Richard Ratcliffe’s daughter has had a turbulent childhood, its horrors redeemed by the all-encompassing love of her parents and extended family. And now there is her friendship with Elika to sustain her, too.

Gabriella was 22 months old when Nazanin took her on holiday to Iran to visit her parents. She was arrested as she was about to board her flight back to the UK, arbitrarily charged, then imprisoned.

Elika says: ‘When I hugged my dad for the first time in five years, the world around me didn’t exist. I was in a bubble. It was very emotional. We are not the type of family who cry, but it was an extraordinary situation’ 

For the next three years Gabriella lived in Tehran with her grandparents to be close to her mother, so she could visit her in Evin prison.

Then, in the autumn of 2019, when she was due to start school, Gabriella returned to England to live with her dad. 

Accountant Richard has been a tireless campaigner: lobbying politicians, leafleting, organising events and enduring weeks of hunger strikes to raise the profile of his wife’s case.

Only Elika could understand Gabriella’s singular deprivation. In 2017, her own father was arrested, then sentenced to 12 years in prison on fabricated charges of spying, after he left the family home in South London to visit his mother in Iran.

Few children have to endure such brutal separation from their parents. But Elika, an actor, patissiere and cake designer, who runs a stall on Greenwich Market in South-East London, could empathise entirely.

I wonder if Gabriella viewed Elika as a substitute mum during Nazanin’s absence. ‘No one could ever have replaced her mum, but I suppose for a little while it was natural for her to see me, on a subconscious level, as filling the void left by her mother.’

It must have been a comfort to Gabriella, knowing that she had a friend who understood so acutely the pain of separation from a parent, I suggest.

‘I’ve never thought about it like that, but yes, I guess maybe she thought: ‘Elika is the only other person I’m friends with who knows what I’m going through.’ ‘

Elika first encountered Gabriella at a Christmas carol-singing session in 2019 outside the Foreign Office in London, one of the events in aid of their parents’ release.

‘We shared a bond from the very second we met,’ Elika remembers. ‘Gabriella is ahead of her years, a bundle of energy and joy, but when I first saw her she was very shy. She had just arrived from Iran and she didn’t speak much English.

‘I said ‘Hello’ to her, but it was a busy event, there was a lot of commotion and she was so young. I let her be and talked to Richard, and as our campaigns evolved, Gabriella and I started to hang out.’

The friendship that slowly grew was a charming one: the two connected in particular over their shared love of jokes — a capacity for humour helped to dissipate the pall of sadness hanging over their lives.

‘Gabriella is so funny,’ says Elika, who is also a smiley, gloriously positive woman with striking features and a rich, infectious laugh. ‘She actually makes clever, quite sophisticated jokes. 

‘Her vocabulary is amazing. She doesn’t dumb down her language like some children.

‘She doesn’t like to make mistakes or be taken lightly. Humour is an escape and I’m lucky to have it, too. Otherwise I wouldn’t have stayed sane. I found I could channel my frustrations and sadness into making jokes — and cakes. I threw myself into that and my customers’ happiness helps dispel my own worries.’

Gabriella, she recognises, was unconsciously using the same strategies to cope.

Finally, after years of false hopes, broken promises and crushing disappointments, the moment they had been longing for arrived.

‘When we went to meet our parents, before the plane landed she was saying, ‘Let’s play!’ I was doing the live feed on my phone and we pulled funny faces together and took selfies. She has a game with dice you roll and you have to improvise stories. She loves that. And she loves painting and chess and playing the piano.

‘She did her own little commentary as the plane touched down. They were struggling to get the steps up to the plane and Gabriella said, ‘Maybe they should take the plane to the stairs instead.’ 

And she tries to be a force of positive energy, too, to lighten the atmosphere around her.’

There are other striking resemblances between their lives.

Home at last: The Zaghari-Ratcliffe family are finally reunited after Nazanin was detained for nearly six years in Iran

‘Gabriella’s relationship with Richard is amazing. I love it,’ she says. ‘It reminds me so much of mine with my dad at that age. 

‘He is very calm, relaxed and softly spoken, just like Richard. And when I see Gabriella and Richard together I feel nostalgic. He is so devoted to her. My dad is just like that, too.’

Just as Richard, 45, Nazanin, 43, and Gabriella are a close-knit trio, so too is the relationship between Anoosheh, his wife Sherry, 58, and their children Elika and Aryan, 32. Their lives — the Ratcliffes’ north of the Thames, the Ashooris in South London — will be forever enmeshed.

Elika and her partner Harry, a chef, live in Dartford, Kent, with their three dogs Mango, Noodle and Chickpea. ‘Gabriella loves Mango and she loves making cookies, so that’s what we did when we first started to hang out,’ says Elika. 

She and Gabriella also made a short film together for Amnesty International in December 2020, which poignantly shines a light on their friendship. It begins with a gentle and tentative exploration of their painful shared experience.

Gabriella asks Elika: ‘What was the last wish you made?’

Elika replies: ‘I made a birthday wish for my dad and your mum to come back.’

With quiet deliberation, Gabriella then asks when Elika misses her dad most, and her friend replies that it’s at Christmas, on birthdays and when she bakes the cakes he used to love.

Gabriella, clutching a doll, holds it to her face and says, almost obscuring the words she finds hardest of all to articulate, that she really misses her mum at bedtime, and cries sometimes.

The film then captures them baking together, Gabriella’s hands smeared in chocolate; even Mango sporting a blob of it. 

There are biscuits to send in packages to Iran for Nazanin and Anoosheh —and yes, they are actually delivered to Evin prison, although it seems that Anoosheh’s are confiscated by the guards.

But if we believe it is Elika who is supporting Gabriella, we are understanding only half the story, because Elika says her young friend helps her, too.

‘There is a generation gap between us but we share something really profound,’ she says. ‘[What she has been through] is such a complicated, sophisticated thing to deal with and she has experienced first-hand more than I have. She has been to Evin prison and visited her mum, and to me that would be daunting as an adult.

‘I don’t know what it must feel like for a small child to have done that — to have been taken by prison guards to see her mummy. Yet she talks about it in such a matter-of-fact way and I think, if she can handle it, surely I can handle Dad’s absence as well.

‘We learn from each other. It doesn’t matter what age you are.’

So now, as they adjust to ‘normal’ life once again and become reaccustomed to having both parents in their lives, will they go on being friends?

‘I hope so,’ says Elika. ‘But just now Gabriella needs to cherish the time with her mum. Then, when she’s ready, she can come for a walk with Mango and me and we’ll make some more cookies.

‘I will be there, too, if she ever wants to confide in me. But most of all, I hope she won’t remember enough to need to.’