British couple Lindsay and Craig Foreman are trapped in Iran’s hellish Evin Prison after being incarcerated on trumped up spying charges
The four children of a British couple held in Iran after being accused of spying today handed a petition in at Downing Street calling for urgent action from the UK government.
Lindsay and Craig Foreman, both aged 53, have been held in jail in Tehran since January 2025 after being handed ten-year sentences for espionage – which they deny – after being arrested while on a motorbiking trip around the world.
Their kids Joe Bennett, 31, and Toby Rutland, 19, and Craig’s children Kieran, 28, and Chelsea Foreman, 30, have gathered more than 84,000 signatures calling for the government to help release them. Joe today told the Mirror: “We’ve got a fight on our hands, I know we have, but the point we’re making today is we won’t stop fighting.”
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They were joined by other family and friends, as well as former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith and other parliamentarians, including Baroness Helena Kennedy, MP Brendan O’Hara, and MP Tony Vaughan, who will table an adjournment debate in Parliament on Thursday. Earlier on Wednesday morning they had cheered a motorcycle procession, which passed the Iranian Embassy before ending in Parliament Square, to mark 500 days of Lindsay and Craig’s incarceration.
Joe, who has quit his software sales job to campaign for the release of his mum and stepdad, admitted: “It’s been dark days, dark weeks. It’s scary to think we’re at 500 days, it’s a long time. But we’re at 500 days and we need to make sure we’re doing everything we can to reduce how long they’re in there for.”
Lindsay and Craig were previously permitted phone calls from jail, but were stripped of them earlier this month, cutting their only form of contact with loved ones. They are now both understood to be on hunger strike in protest.
Joe says he is worried for their health, but understands why they have decided to do it. He said: “It’s very hard on us as a family as we don’t know how they are. Hearing through sources that they are on hunger strike heightens the need to speak to them.
“It heightens our anxiety as no one wants them on hunger strike, but their only agency to be seen or heard is by doing what they’re doing. It’s a desperation act, they are desperate to come home, they are sick of the inertia and the lies and manipulation of the Iranian regime.”
Describing the conditions they are being held in, he added: “It’s vermin infested, the food is inadequate and there’s no exercise space. It’s just torment. They have experienced things no normal person can imagine.”
Joe, from Folkestone, Kent, is in regular contact with Richard Ratcliffe, who went on hunger strike twice in a bid to get his wife Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe freed from her incarceration in Iran. Joe said: “It’s awful how common this is – not just with UK nationals. It’s a western problem.
“There needs to be an accumulation of pressure, not just from the UK government, but every government to say ‘what you’re doing isn’t right’. You’re taking innocent people and your using them for leverage. Everything seems to be siloed and I don’t think that’s the solution if you want to stop the atrocity that’s going on for so many people.”
Minister Hamish Falconer recently described the couple as “innocent tourists” in Parliament, with the UK government slamming the case as “appalling”. The Foreign Office has said it will keep working to get them safely back to the UK, calling their incarceration appalling and unjustified.
Tony Vaughan, MP for Folkestone and Hythe, said: “So much time has passed and the family feels like nothing has happened. What they do need to feel is the confidence that the government is doing everything that they can to bring Craig and Lindsay home.
“It’s good that the government has accepted that they’re innocent tourists but they need to be explicit that this is a hostage taking, that they are essentially being used by Iran. Their arbitrary detention needs to be called out explicitly so that the government can up the stakes of what they’re doing. Let’s call a spade a spade so that we can take the steps necessary to protect them”.
Fellow MP Iain Duncan Smith, himself a keen motorcyclist, is also among those campaigning to help the couple. He said: “They’re hostages. They’ve not committed any crime in Iran – they were taken because they thought they needed hostages against future action by various countries in the west, of which Britain is one.
“They have suffered terrible torture and all for what, all they did was ride across the border and they were going to leave the other side. The way to retaliate against that is to prescribe the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] here in the UK, who are behind huge amounts of terrorist activity taking place here.
“A British citizen should be able to point to their passport and say I am British and our government will protect us but I don’t know if that is the case today. I think it’s time for us to say you cannot arrest and take British citizens unless you have a very clear and reasonable case against them for something they’ve done.”
Mr Duncan Smith added: “I hope what happens next is that the British government says if you don’t release these people, we’re going to take action against all of your operatives here in the IRGC and we should take it now, we should be arresting these people and saying if you want your operatives back, they have to leave but you release the British citizens.”
