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Tehran Accuses Paris of 'Interfering' Over Detained Nationals

This handout picture taken in 2019, courtesy of the family and made available on May 3, 2024, shows Cecile Kohler during her 35 years old birthday party. (Photo by HANDOUT / FAMILY HANDOUT / AFP)
This handout picture taken in 2019, courtesy of the family and made available on May 3, 2024, shows Cecile Kohler during her 35 years old birthday party. (Photo by HANDOUT / FAMILY HANDOUT / AFP)
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Tehran Accuses Paris of 'Interfering' Over Detained Nationals

This handout picture taken in 2019, courtesy of the family and made available on May 3, 2024, shows Cecile Kohler during her 35 years old birthday party. (Photo by HANDOUT / FAMILY HANDOUT / AFP)
This handout picture taken in 2019, courtesy of the family and made available on May 3, 2024, shows Cecile Kohler during her 35 years old birthday party. (Photo by HANDOUT / FAMILY HANDOUT / AFP)

Iran condemned as "interfering" Tuesday a French foreign ministry statement accusing it of "state hostage-taking" and "blackmail" in the detention of four French nationals.

"We strongly condemn such unprofessional, interfering and inappropriate positions while resorting to false references," foreign ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani told state news agency IRNA.

"The people mentioned in the statement of the French foreign ministry were arrested based on solid evidence and witnesses, and the French government is well aware of their crimes."

Teacher Cecile Kohler and her partner Jacques Paris were detained in Iran in May 2022. They are accused of seeking to stir up labor unrest, accusations their families vehemently deny.

"France condemns this policy of state hostage-taking and this constant blackmail by the Iranian authorities," the French foreign ministry said in a statement on May 7, calling for the couple's release.

Kanani called on Paris "to avoid resorting to such statements and using words outside of diplomatic decency, which have negative consequences on relations between the two countries."

Kohler and Paris both made televised confessions after their arrest that France described as "forced,” AFP reported.

Two other French citizens are held by Iran -- a man identified only by his first name, Olivier, and Louis Arnaud, a banking consultant who was sentenced to five years in jail on national security charges last year.

The four are among at least a dozen European passport holders in Iranian custody, some of them dual nationals.

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Jean-Marie Le Pen, Founder of France's Post-war Far Right, Dies Aged 96

French Far-Right Front National founder Jean-Marie Le Pen speaks to journalists during a news conference on the sidelines of the National Front political party summer university in Marseille, France, September 5, 2013. REUTERS/Jean-Paul Pelissier/File Photo
French Far-Right Front National founder Jean-Marie Le Pen speaks to journalists during a news conference on the sidelines of the National Front political party summer university in Marseille, France, September 5, 2013. REUTERS/Jean-Paul Pelissier/File Photo
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Jean-Marie Le Pen, Founder of France's Post-war Far Right, Dies Aged 96

French Far-Right Front National founder Jean-Marie Le Pen speaks to journalists during a news conference on the sidelines of the National Front political party summer university in Marseille, France, September 5, 2013. REUTERS/Jean-Paul Pelissier/File Photo
French Far-Right Front National founder Jean-Marie Le Pen speaks to journalists during a news conference on the sidelines of the National Front political party summer university in Marseille, France, September 5, 2013. REUTERS/Jean-Paul Pelissier/File Photo

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of France's far-right National Front party who tapped into blue-collar anger over immigration and globalisation and revelled in minimising the Holocaust, died on Tuesday aged 96.
His death was confirmed by his daughter Marine Le Pen's political party, National Rally (Rassemblement National).
Jean-Marie Le Pen spent his life fighting - as a soldier in France's colonial wars, as a founder in 1972 of the National Front, for which he contested five presidential elections, or in feuds with his daughters and ex-wife, often conducted publicly.

Controversy was Le Pen's constant companion: his multiple convictions for inciting racial hatred and condoning war crimes dogged the National Front, according to Reuters.
His declaration that the Nazi gas chambers were "merely a detail" of World War Two history and that the Nazi occupation of France was "not especially inhumane" were for many people repulsive.
"If you take a book of a thousand pages on World War Two, in which 50 million people died, the concentration camps occupy two pages and the gas chambers ten or 15 lines, and that's what one calls a detail," Le Pen said in the late 1990s, doubling down on earlier remarks.
Those comments provoked outrage, including in France, where police had rounded up thousands of Jews who were deported to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz.
Commenting on Le Pen's death, President Emmanuel Macron said: "A historic figure of the far right, he played a role in the public life of our country for nearly seventy years, which is now a matter for history to judge."
Le Pen helped reset the parameters of French politics in a career spanning 40 years that, harnessing discontent over immigration and job security, in some ways heralded Donald Trump's rise to the White House.
He reached a presidential election run-off in 2002 but lost by a landslide to Jacques Chirac. Voters backed a mainstream conservative rather than bring the far right to power for the first time since Nazi collaborators ruled in the 1940s.
Le Pen was the scourge of the European Union, which he saw as a supranational project usurping the powers of nation states, tapping the kind of resentment felt by many Britons who later voted to leave the EU.
Marine Le Pen learned of her father's death during a layover in Kenya as she returned from the French overseas territory of Mayotte.
Born in Brittany in 1928, Jean-Marie Le Pen studied law in Paris in the early 1950s and had a reputation for rarely spending a night out on the town without a brawl. He joined the Foreign Legion as a paratrooper fighting in Indochina in 1953.
Le Pen campaigned to keep Algeria French, as an elected member of France's parliament and a soldier in the then French-run territory. He publicly justified the use of torture but denied using such practices himself.
After years on the periphery of French politics, his fortunes changed in 1977 when a millionaire backer bequeathed him a mansion outside Paris and 30 million francs, around 5 million euros ($5.2 million) in today's money.
The helped Le Pen further his political ambitions, despite being shunned by traditional parties.
"Lots of enemies, few friends and honor aplenty," he told a website linked to the far-right. He wrote in his memoir: "No regrets."
In 2011, Le Pen was succeeded as party chief by daughter Marine, who campaigned to shed the party's enduring image as antisemitic and rebrand it as a defender of the working class.
She has reached - and lost - two presidential election run-offs. Opinion polls make her the frontrunner in the next presidential election, due in 2027.
The rebranding did not sit well with her father, whose inflammatory statements and sniping forced her to expel him from the party.
Jean-Marie Le Pen described as a "betrayal" his daughter's decision to change the party's name in 2018 to National Rally, and said she should marry to lose her family name.
Their relationship remained difficult but he had warm words for her when Macron defeated her in 2022: "She did all she could, she did very well."