FRANCE’S INTERIOR minister has signed an expulsion order for the man convicted of assassinating former Iranian prime minister Shahpour Bakhtiar at his home outside Paris in 1991.
A court is due to rule today on a parole request by Ali Vakili Rad, an Iranian who is serving a life sentence in France, but yesterday’s order by Brice Hortefeux clears the way for him to be released and returned home.
The minister’s decision has stoked speculation that the French government has struck a deal with Tehran to secure the release of the young French teacher Clotilde Reiss, who was flown to Paris on Sunday after being detained by the Iranians for 10 months on spying charges.
Vakili Rad is serving a life sentence for stabbing Mr Bakhtiar to death at his home outside Paris in August 1991, but he had recently asked for parole and Iranian leaders had linked his case to that of Ms Reiss.
France has denied cutting a deal with Iran to secure the release of the Ms Reiss (24), whose case caused almost a year of diplomatic wrangling between Paris and Tehran.
Just before her release, an Iranian court commuted concurrent five-year jail terms Ms Reiss had received after being accused of joining protests, gathering information and sending photographs abroad during unrest that broke out after last June’s disputed presidential elections in Iran.
The French government has insisted there was no quid pro quo for Ms Reiss’s release, but opposition politicians say the sequence of recent events casts doubt on official claims. “It’s always better when one tells the truth,” Socialist Party spokesman Benoit Hamon remarked yesterday.
Just two weeks ago, France infuriated Washington by refusing to extradite an Iranian engineer who was accused of illegally buying electronic equipment from US firms for military use.
As debate intensified on the circumstances of the case yesterday, a former senior official at France’s foreign intelligence service claimed that Ms Reiss had provided French intelligence with information on the Iranian political climate and arms proliferation issues.
Pierre Siramy, a former deputy director of the DGSE, who is at loggerheads with the service since he published an account of his time there, said she was not a spy “in the classic sense of the term” but had handed over information to the French embassy.
The claim was immediately dismissed as “pure fantasy” and “irresponsible” by the foreign ministry, which has insisted that Ms Reiss, who was working as a teaching assistant in the city of Isfahan, was innocent of the charges brought against her.
As for Vakili Rad, his release would come 15 years after he was convicted for his role in the murder of Mr Bakhtiar. Vakili Rad was one of three people who assaulted Mr Bakhtiar in an attack that also led to the death of his secretary. The other two assailants managed to escape.
The killers were thought to be supporters of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Mr Bakhtiar fled his country after the 1979 revolution and lived in exile in Paris until his murder.