French researcher back home after Iran trial ordeal

French academic Clotilde Reiss flew home from Iran yesterday, 10 months after she was arrested and accused of spying, as France denied striking a secret deal with Tehran.

A French government jet brought the 24-year-old researcher to an airbase outside Paris, from where she was whisked to the Élysée Palace to be welcomed back by President Nicolas Sarkozy, after her lawyer paid Iran a fine of more than $250,000.

Speaking briefly to reporters after she and her family met with Mr Sarkozy, Ms Reiss thanked the French leader for protesting her innocence and paid tribute to her former fellow detainees, two of whom have been put to death.

"They treated me like a sister," Ms Reiss said of fellow prisoners she met in Iranian custody, paying "particular homage ... to the two men you saw on television beside me at my trial, who have been executed."

Her arrival brought an end to a long drama which raised tensions between France and Iran and saw the young scholar paraded at a televised show trial and spend six weeks in Tehran's notorious Evin prison.

The release came after a French court ruled against a US extradition request for an Iranian engineer and shortly before another judge was to rule on the parole request of a jailed Iranian assassin.

But French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner angrily insisted there had been "no haggling and no pay off" to ensure the release and said there had been no link between the French and Iranian cases.

"This series of judicial rulings - in France we don't influence judges' decision - has nothing to do with any haggling, any alleged bargaining," he said, in an interview with Radio J.

But Mr Sarkozy warmly thanked presidents Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil, Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal and Bashar al-Assad of Syria for their "active role" in the release, suggesting some backroom dealing must have taken place.

Mr Wade told RTL Radio he had offered, as chairman of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference to intercede with Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on France's behalf, before being asked to stand down.

But well-placed observers, including former and serving French diplomats, said France had resisted Iranian pressure to tie Ms Reiss' fate to that of the Iranian detainees and that French justice had simply run its course.

François Nicoullaud, a former French ambassador to Tehran, suggested that Iran might even have slowed down the release of its nationals.

"French justice didn't want to give the impression it was under pressure from Tehran," he said.

Other sources said the release may have come about because Iran is under pressure over its nuclear programme and wanted to put at least one difficult case behind it before welcoming President Lula to a mini-summit.

Ms Reiss was put on trial last August on charges of acting against national security, at a time when relations between Paris and Tehran were already bitterly hostile because of French concerns over Iran's nuclear programme.