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French Citizen Returns Home after Iran Prison Ordeal

Arnaud was greeted by Foreign Minister Stephane Sejourne. POOL/AFP
Arnaud was greeted by Foreign Minister Stephane Sejourne. POOL/AFP
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French Citizen Returns Home after Iran Prison Ordeal

Arnaud was greeted by Foreign Minister Stephane Sejourne. POOL/AFP
Arnaud was greeted by Foreign Minister Stephane Sejourne. POOL/AFP

Frenchman Louis Arnaud returned to Paris on Thursday after his release from an over 20-month prison ordeal in Iran, but a dozen Europeans are still detained in the Islamic republic.
Activists and some Western governments, including France, accuse Iran of exercising a strategy of taking foreign nationals as hostages aimed at extracting concessions from the West, said AFP.
Arnaud, who was held in Iran from September 2022 and sentenced last year to five years in jail on national security charges, was described by his family as a traveler who wanted to see the world and was innocent of all charges.
Emerging from a small plane at Le Bourget airport outside Paris, a visibly tired but smiling Arnaud shook hands with Foreign Minister Stephane Sejourne before embracing his parents, according to images aired on television.
Arnaud, 36, linked arms with his relatives as they entered a private room at the airport out of view of the cameras.
"I am very glad to welcome one of our hostages who was indeed held arbitrarily in Iran," Sejourne said.
"Our diplomatic service is still at work" to free three other French citizens: Jacques Paris, Cecile Kohler and a man named only as Olivier held in Iranian jails, he added.
In a statement after his release, Arnaud's mother Sylvie said "we have been waiting for our son to return for almost 21 months. A wait that should never have existed."
"Our thoughts are with those who are still waiting for the return of their loved ones and we will remain at their side until they can experience this same happiness," she added.
The circumstances of Arnaud's freeing were not immediately clear. Announcing his release on X late Wednesday, President Emmanuel Macron made a point of thanking our "Omani friends and all those who worked towards this happy outcome."
Oman has frequently in the past worked as a mediator between Iran and the West in such situations. A diplomatic source told AFP he had been flown back to Paris via Oman.
'Dreamt of visiting'
Arnaud set off in July 2022 on a round-the-world trip that led him to Iran.
It was "a country he had long dreamt of visiting for the richness of its history and its welcoming people," Sylvie Arnaud said several months ago.
But he was arrested in September 2022 with other Europeans accused of joining demonstrations over the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurd who died after her arrest by the morality police in Tehran for allegedly breaching Iran's strict dress code for women.
While Arnaud's traveling companions were soon released, he was kept in prison before his November sentencing on charges of making propaganda against the regime and harming Iranian state security.
Frenchman Benjamin Briere and French-Irish dual national Bernard Phelan were freed by Iran in May 2023 for "humanitarian reasons".
Both had been severely weakened by a hunger strike.
Besides the three French still in prison, Tehran is holding nationals and dual nationals from European countries including Britain, Germany and Sweden.
Two of them -- German Jamshid Sharmahd and Swede Ahmadreza Djalali -- risk execution after being sentenced to death on charges their families say are utterly false.
Also held is Swedish EU diplomat Johan Floderus whom prosecutors want sentenced to death on spying charges his family strongly rejects.
Activists say Swedish nationals have been especially targeted over the life sentence given in Sweden to former Iranian prison official Hamid Noury for his role in mass executions in Iran in 1988.
According to Washington, the release of the five US citizens in September last year means there are no more US nationals detained in Iran.

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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."