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Tehran’s prosecutor general has said that a letter from David Cameron pleading for the release of a British-Iranian woman serving a five-year jail term in Iran on charges relating to national security was “confirmation that she had links with the UK government”.

In his first explicit comments spelling out reasons for Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s arrest in April 2016, Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi said on Tuesday that her arrest was important to the British establishment.

Dolatabadi’s comments suggest that Iran is suspicious of British attempts to secure Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s release. They come after Theresa May raised her case with the Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, on the sidelines of the UN general assembly last month.

Dolatabadi added that Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s work training journalists at the BBC was behind her conviction, saying that she ran an online course that trained participants in encryption. The BBC’s Persian service is loathed by the Iranian establishment, which considers it a subversive arm of British intelligence service MI6.

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