Narges Rashidi plays the part of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe in the upcoming four-part drama Credit: BBC Pictures

Tim Sigsworth

The Telegraph

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s imprisonment in Iran has been turned into a new BBC series.

The British-Iranian mother-of-one was detained for six years in Tehran on false accusations of spying.

She will be played by Narges Rashidi, star of crime thriller Gangs of London, in the four-part drama.

Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe was detained in April 2016 as she was about to fly back to London after visiting her parents in Tehran.

Falsely accused of espionage, she was not released until 2022 when Britain agreed to pay a decades-old tank debt worth £400m.

The new BBC series, titled Prisoner 951, is based on A Yard of Sky, an upcoming memoir written about the ordeal by Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe and her husband, Richard Ratcliffe.

It will detail her detention and the fight by Mr Ratcliffe, who is played by Joseph Fiennes, to secure her release.

He completed two hunger strikes during her internment in an attempt to persuade ministers to do more to free her.

Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe was with her daughter, Gabriella, when she was arrested at Tehran’s airport and the girl spent the next three years living with her grandparents in Iran.

In 2017, Boris Johnson appeared before the foreign affairs select committee in Parliament and wrongly said Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been in Iran to train journalists.

He was accused of worsening her situation because training independent journalists in Iran is regarded as sedition. But he has denied that his remarks prompted further charges against her or the lengthening of her sentence.

In 1979, shortly before he was deposed, the Shah of Iran had placed a £400m order for British tanks and armoured cars.

But because of the coup by Ayatollah Khomeini they were never delivered. The mullahs subsequently launched a long-running campaign for the money to be refunded.

Iran has previously said the cash deal for Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s release was first mooted by Philip Hammond when he was foreign secretary under the Conservative government in 2016.

The series was adapted by Stephen Butchard and directed by Bafta award-winner Philippa Lowthorpe.

It will be released on BBC iPlayer and BBC One later this year.