PARIS - The killer of a former Iranian prime minister who opposed the country's clerical regime was released from a life sentence and sent home Tuesday in what critics called an apparent trade for a young French academic just freed by Iran.
A French government spokesman said he had no knowledge that Ali Vakili Rad was being exchanged for Clotile Reiss, 24, who was arrested in Iran on July 1 during postelection unrest, accused of spying and sentenced to 10 years in prison. She returned to France on Sunday after her sentence was commuted.
Minister for European Affairs Pierre Lellouche and Vakili Rad's lawyer both denied there had been a trade.
Vakili Rad was convicted in the 1991 assassination of Shahpour Bakhtiar, who served as prime minister under Iran's shah before the U.S.-backed monarch was deposed in the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Bakhtiar moved to a home outside Paris, where he organized opposition to the revolutionary government.
Vakili Rad is regarded as a hero by Iran's leaders for killing someone they considered a counterrevolutionary. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast welcomed his expected return, telling reporters that, "To see him in Iran after years, we are pleased."
In France, the prosecution maintained that Iran was behind the slaying of Bakhtiar.
Vakili Rad was convicted by a special French terrorism court of assassinating Bakhtiar and his aide Souroush Katibeh and sentenced to life with the possibility of seeking conditional freedom starting in June 2009. When a prisoner is released before a full sentence is completed, freedom is often conditional, forcing him or her to report to authorities regularly. However, French law allows foreigners with no ties to France to be expelled.
Vakili Rad was convicted three years after the killing of Bakhtiar, 76. Two other Iranians were found guilty of providing logistical support for the killing. Two other accused killers were never caught.
Sorin Margulis, Vakili Rad's attorney, said his client intended to work in a travel agency in Iran.
Vakili Rad left the prison in Poissy, outside Paris, under police escort and headed in a three-car motorcade in the direction of the capital's Orly airport. Margulis confirmed that his client had left France on an afternoon flight for Tehran.
The French Interior Ministry issued an expulsion order Monday, and the release was approved a day later by the Paris Court of Appeals.
French officials denied reports made by a former senior French intelligence official that Reiss was in fact a spy. Minister Lellouche said the allegations by Pierre Siramy, a former deputy director of the DGSE intelligence service, were "ridiculous."
Foreign Ministry spokesman Bernard Valero told Associated Press Television News that he had no knowledge of any bargain struck for Reiss' freedom, and that such questions cast "doubts about the independence of the French justice system."
Margulis said "my client was in a position to be freed before the arrest of Miss Reiss."
Vakili Rad is the second Iranian freed by French courts in less than two weeks.
Two weeks ago, Iranian Majid Kakavand was permitted to leave France and return to Iran. He had been detained in France on a U.S. warrant accusing him of evading export controls to purchase technology over the Internet to sell to Iran's military.
France has cut deals with Iran in the past to obtain freedom for French citizens.
In 1990, France pardoned a Lebanese man convicted for a failed attack on Bakhtiar that killed two other people in 1980. Anis Naccache and his four accomplices were expelled to Tehran. Naccache's freedom had been demanded by Iranian-backed terrorists who set off deadly bombs around Paris in 1986.
