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i went to iran on march 17th 2016 to take my baby girl, to show her to my family, and that wasn t the first time that she was going to iran. but we would always go for nowruz holiday, which is the new year in iran, purely because the city is empty, the weather is nice and especially the holiday season. but also, the two weeks that i was in iran, everywhere was closed and we felt like it s a good time to hang out with family. while i was coming out of iran, at the airport in tehran, i was arrested without being told what was the problem. theyjust said, there is something wrong about your passport, and, of course, my daughter was 22 months old, very little. where did she go when you were arrested in the airport? my parents were inside the airport with me and i was queuing up for the check in, so i gave the baby to them. they told me, you are going to be released in the morning, so everything is going to be fine, it s just a couple of questions, which it wasn t. i did not ....
A happy ending. so we have many people who were left behind. so ifi. i cannot begin to tell you how i felt that day, when i realised that morad was not on the flight with us. so morad is morad tahbaz. yes. is the iranian american british hostage. we were assuming that anoosheh, me and morad would be on the same flight. and anoosheh was with you, we ll just say that as well. anoosheh was with me. so you thought it would be the three of you? i thought that i would see both of them at the airport. couldn t see morad. but i tried to think what morad would have felt at the time that he realised that he was left behind. there is this kind of pain that you cannot even begin to imagine. no human being should be attached to international agreements. you know, we should make them separate. with regards to iran, i m also just aware that that is your home country, your place of birth. it s, of course, where you still have family and many friends and links. ....
You about that debt when you first asked them? do you remember the day that you raised it with them? the foreign office up until i would say perhaps last year, even maybe later, denied that there was any link between the two cases, between the debts and the cases of my husband and nazanin. reporter: once the uk paid the debt both nazanin and anoosheh were released and on a government plane back home. in a statement after their release uk foreign secretary liz truss said, in parallel we have also settled the ims debt as we said we would. there we go. yeah. reporter: iran s foreign minister acknowledged the debt had been paid but denied there was any link to the prisoner release. when we arrived in britain and i saw sherri, the way nazanin saw her daughter and she ....
i should have started immediately after he was taken. and i honestly urge all families to do the same because it s very easy to be forgotten. thursdays and fridays it was closed. so we had to do reporter: anoosheh moved out of the interrogation center and could meet his fellow detainees in what they called the university of eivin, forming poetry societies and creating art. this is just fantastic. and how did doing this help you? you forgot that you were in the prison because you were so engrossed in doing these things. so to finish a day takes centuries. but then years pass very quickly. reporter: and it took years for the family to realize that anoosheh s ordeal was linked to a decades-old debt that the uk owed iran, worth more than $500 million. what did the foreign office tell ....
Ordeal. this is the yard. and we have two trees here. that is before i had made that shelter for myself. reporter: anoushah ashuri showed me the yard inside tehran s notorious prison where he worked hard to create a semblance of norm ality. so i used to sit here even during winter and when it was even snowing. reporter: it s been just over a month since anoosheh was released from evan prison. among with the british aid worker that s nooen sa garri radcliff. the iranian prison where he spent nearbily five years. how does it feel? fantastic. unbelievable. still i am adjusting to my new environment. i ll wake up sometimes and i fear that it may still be a dream. it still doesn t feel quite ....