Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe Passport: Why Did Iran Return Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s UK Passport?

According to Ms Siddiq, the Labour MP for Hampstead and Kilburn, British negotiators were in the Iranian capital.

For U.K Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, negotiations about “all our difficult consular cases have been going on for a long time”.

The prime minister added: “Everybody wants Nazanin home, we’ve been working on that for a long, long time, I do not want to do anything to interrupt conversations right now.”

According to Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s employer the Thomson Reuters Foundation, her lawyer Hojjat Kermani has said he is “hopeful that we will have good news soon”.

A £400m debt relating to a cancelled order for 1,500 Chieftain tanks dating back to the 1970s had been linked to the continued detention of Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe and other UK-Iranian dual nationals held in the country – although the government has said the two issues should not be linked.

Downing Street said it was committed to paying the debt and was “exploring options to resolve it”, but said it had not been resolved.

A Foreign Office spokesman said it continued to “explore options” to resolve the debt but would not comment further as discussions were ongoing.

He added the Foreign Office would not comment on speculation about Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe but had long called for the release of “unfairly detained British nationals in Iran”.