Western narrative about Zaghari’s Iran mission challenged

Iran’s Judiciary has released documents to local media outlets which challenge the Western accounts that Iranian national Nazanin Zaghari – now serving time in Iran on espionage charges - had merely traveled to the country from Britain for a family visit.

Iran’s intelligence authorities arrested Zaghari at the Imam Khomeini International Airport in April 2016 as she was on her back to London. She was subsequently put on trial and handed a five-year jail term after being found guilty of spying and spreading propaganda against the Islamic Republic.

As per the released documents, Zaghari had played an active and leading role in holding training courses for recruits at BBC World Service Trust and the ZigZag Academy.

The ZigZag academy, the documents suggest, pursued two main goals, namely training and recruitment of human resources for the launch of BBC Persian Service and deployment of undercover reporters in Iran to gather intelligence.

She identified potential Iranian recruits and invited them to attend the training courses, received and reviewed their resumes, managed financial affairs related to the courses in Malaysia and India, picked trainers, assessed the performance of the participants and managed the ZigZag Academy’s websites.

In an e-mail to one of the BBC managers in 2010, she revealed that she was working as a “Training Assistant” within the Iran team at BBC World Service Trust.

“Our project, ZigZag Academy, is an online journalism scheme that trains young aspiring journalists from Iran and Afghanistan through a secure online platform,” Zaghari explained.

The documents also pointed to Zaghari’s role in coordinating trainers and trainees during several courses held at the BBC central building in London and cited some of the security measures taught in the course, including the use of aliases for secure communication with abroad, the use of multi-layered encryption and encoding software.

Among the released documents was also an image of Zaghari's paycheck which showed she had been in the employment of the BBC.

The documents also revealed that she had joined the British Training Station company in 2010 presumed to be engaged in hostile measures against the Islamic establishment. She had also played a role in producing and preparing three other projects against Iran.

The following image is the first page of a contract between the Training Station and Zaghari:

After Zaghari started cooperating with the Training Station, the alias “Parisa” was chosen for her, and her emails would be sent with the fake name, the documents said.

The Training Station is a company active in the field of toppling governments, the documents said, adding that it received its projects and budgets from various organizations and institutions such as the state-run United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and Internews non-profit organization.

‘West using Zaghari as propaganda weapon’

Speaking to Press TV, an analyst said Western media is attempting to use the case of Zaghari as a “propaganda weapon” against Iran.

“It is interesting that this is going on in the same time period in which the [Donald] Trump administration in the United States is attempting to abrogate the nuclear deal with the Iranian government … So it is clear that the real objective here is to use this particular case as a propaganda weapon against the Iranians for the sake of undermining the nuclear deal that the Trump administration has stated its intention to do and the British government is clearly going to be complicit,” Keith Preston, chief editor and director of AttacktheSystem.com, said in an interview on Saturday.

Zaghari’s case is being used by the West as a “potential weapon” for the advancement of foreign policy objectives, he added.

Therefore, Preston said, it is obvious why this particular case has been going on in the Western media the way that it has.

British media have said that Zaghari worked for the Thomson Reuters Foundation. However, UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said in a recent statement to a parliamentary committee that Zaghari had been “simply teaching people journalism.”

Johnson's remarks amounted to an accidental confession that Zaghari was plotting against the Iranian government, but British authorities described the remark as a gaffe.  

PressTV-Iran denies UK plan to repay debt for Zaghari release

Iran’s intelligence authorities arrested Zaghari on spying charges at the Imam Khomeini International Airport in April on her way home to London after visiting her parents in Tehran.

The Telegraph has cited unidentified sources as saying that London was planning to transfer over £400 million ($528 million) in debt to Iran to have Zaghari released.

The debt is related to an arms deal signed during the 1970s, with the paper saying that Britain had sought legal advice about the transfer of money to Iran.

The British tabloid daily, The Sun, said Iran had demanded that Britain return the money which the former Shah of Iran paid in 1979 for 1,750 Chieftain tanks and other vehicles, almost none of which was eventually delivered.

Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman, Bahram Qassemi, dismissed the report earlier this month, saying that “the British government’s debt pay-off to Iran has no connection to the case of Mrs. Nazanin Zaghari and these two issues are two separate cases.”

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