TEHRAN (Dispatches) -- Britain will soon transfer its debt of over 400 million pounds ($527 million) to Iran, the Iranian ambassador wrote on his telegram channel on Friday, but said there was no link between paying the debt and the case of jailed British-Iranian aid worker.
"An outstanding debt owed by the U.K. to Tehran will be transferred to the Central Bank of Iran in the coming days. The payment ... has nothing to do with Nazanin Zaghari's case," Hamid Baeedinejad wrote on his Telegram channel.
Iran’s intelligence authorities arrested Zaghari at the Imam Khomeini International Airport in April 2016 on spying charges as she was on her way home to London after visiting her parents in Tehran.
Zaghari was subsequently tried in an Iranian court and sentenced to five years in prison for spreading propaganda against the Islamic Republic.
British media have said that she worked for the Thomson Reuters Foundation. However, UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said in a statement to a parliamentary committee last week 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 them a gaffe.  
The Telegraph cited unidentified sources as saying this week that London was planning to transfer the outstanding debt to Iran to have Zaghari released.
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 Qasemi dismissed the report on Thursday, 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.”
British Prime Minister Theresa May's spokesman also stressed Thursday that there was no link between the £400 million debt owed to Iran and the fate of Zaghari.