DOMINIC Raab has suggested Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is being held a hostage by Iran in treatment that amounts to “torture”.

The 42-year-old - whose sister-in-law Rebecca is a GP in Cwmbran - completed a five-year sentence last month in Tehran on spying charges levied by Iranian authorities, the last year of which was spent under house arrest due to the pandemic.

But last week, the charity worker was sentenced to another year in prison and has been banned from leaving Iran.

Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said she was being used as "leverage" on the UK.

Asked if she is being held hostage, he told the BBC’s The Andrew Marr Show: “I think it’s very difficult to argue against that characterisation.

“It is clear that she is subjected to a cat and mouse game that the Iranians, or certainly part of the Iranian system, engage with and they try and use her for leverage on the UK.”

The British-Iranian dual national was sentenced to a fresh jail term of one year on Monday and handed a year-long travel ban in Iran on a new charge of “spreading propaganda against the regime”.

She has already served a five-year prison sentence after being detained on charges relating to national security in 2016.

The mother-of-one was arrested at Tehran airport as she made her way back to the UK after a visit to her parents to introduce them to her daughter.

She and her family believe she is being held as political leverage to try to force the UK’s hand in a long-running financial dispute between the UK and Iran.

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It dates back to the 1970s when the then-shah of Iran paid the UK £400 million for 1,500 Chieftain tanks.

When the shah was toppled in 1979, Britain refused to deliver the tanks to the new Islamic Republic but kept the cash, despite British courts accepting it should be repaid.

Asked about the debt on Sunday, Mr Raab said: “It’s not solely about that.

“That is not actually the thing that’s holding us up at the moment, it’s the wider context as we come up to the Iranian presidential elections and the wider elections on the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) which, inevitably from the Iranian perspective, the two are considered in tandem.

“Nazanin is held unlawfully, in my view, as a matter of international law. I think she’s being treated in the most abusive, tortuous way. I think it amounts to torture, the way she’s being treated.”