France says embassy employee freed by Iranians

PARIS — Iranian authorities have freed a French Embassy employee on trial in Iran from a Tehran prison, President Nicolas Sarkozy’s office announced Tuesday, asking that a young French academic also be quickly freed.

Sarkozy hopes charges will be dropped against Nazak Afshar, who has duel French-Iranian citizenship, and that another French citizen on trial, 24-year-old academic Clotilde Reiss, can soon return home, a statement said.

The release of Afshar, an employee in the embassy’s cultural section, appeared as surprising as her arrest, which France learned about only after seeing her on television during filming of the mass trial Saturday of more than 100 people accused of fanning revolt in a “velvet” revolution aimed at toppling Iran’s Islamic rulers.

Sarkozy credited France’s EU partners “and other countries, specifically naming Syria, as among those “who provided their support in this first phase.”

France had said it had been using all available contacts in an effort to free the two, who it had said were unjustly suspected of roles in the postelection unrest that engulfed Iran.

Sarkozy spoke with Afshar “as soon as she left prison,” the statement said.

Details of Syria’s role in the release of Afshar were not immediately clear. Iran is a strong ally of Syria, and Sarkozy has strengthened France’s ties with Damascus.

Sarkozy visited Damascus in January, meeting with President Bashar Assad as part of an international bid at the time to stop an Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip — his second visit there.

Sarkozy first went to Syria in September 2008 in a bid to forge stronger ties between France and its former colony. Sarkozy has backed a go-between role for Damascus to bring across Western demands on Tehran.

Afshar cried as she admitted in court Saturday she was involved in postelection disturbances and said “brothers at the Intelligence Ministry made me understand my mistake,” the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported.

Reiss also apologized before the court for attending at least one demonstration but did so because she was curious. She has been charged with acting against national security by joining protests, gathering information, taking photos and sending them abroad during postelection unrest in Iran.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said Sunday that such an admission was “worked on,” suggesting that it had been coerced.

France’s Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, summoned Iran’s ambassador, hours after he told French radio station RFI that an Iranian offer of conditional freedom for Reiss had gone unanswered, although Tehran was seeking to “create favorable conditions” for the young woman.

Seyeb Mehdi Miraboutalebi told RFI that Iran’s vice minister for foreign affairs told judicial authorities that Reiss could be freed if she resides in the French Embassy in Tehran during the rest of the trial. He said the French ambassador had not yet responded.

“We categorically refute this,” a ministry statement said, indicating that the Iranians were dragging their feet on the offer. “The Iranian authorities were informed weeks ago that the French Embassy in Tehran was prepared to welcome Clotilde Reiss as soon as she benefits from a measure freeing her, which is not the case today.”

Reiss had spent five months teaching in Isfahan before being arrested July 1 as she was leaving Iran.

She is among more than 100 suspects in the mass trial.