France frees Iranian assassin

A Paris sentencing court ruled in favour of parole for Vakili Rad,the Paris prosecutor’s office said,one day after the French interior minister signed a deportation order for the Iranian national.

Vakili Rad was expected to fly to Tehran later in the day,his lawyer Sorin Margulis said.

The lawyer insisted the decision was not part of a secret deal with Tehran to secure the release of 24-year-old Clotilde Reiss,who was tried in Tehran on spying charges.

“This must not be seen as an exchange,” Margulis told reporters. “The Reiss affair did nothing but complicate and delay my client’s release.” Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last year linked Reiss’s release to the fate of Iranians held in French jails,but France has firmly denied that a swap had been agreed.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner insisted that there had been no “pay-off” and no “horse-trading” between Paris and Tehran ahead of Reiss’ return home on Sunday at the end of a 10-month ordeal.

Vakili Rad was convicted in 1994 of murdering 76-year-old Bakhtiar at his home on August 6,1991. He served his jail term in Poissy,west of Paris.

The last prime minister under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi,Bakhtiar fled to France in 1980 after the Iranian Revolution and his home in Suresnes,west of Paris,had been under round-the-clock police surveillance.

Vakili Rad and an accomplice were allowed inside the villa by an aide to Bakhtiar,who was murdered along with his secretary Fouroush Katibeh.

Arrested in Switzerland,he was extradited to face trial in France but the other two accomplices escaped.

“He will go back to his country,rebuild his life and work in a travel agency,” said the lawyer.

Opposition Socialists however suggested that France had secured Reiss’ release in exchange for sending Vakili Rad home along with a second man,engineer Majid Kakavand,who was wanted in the United States for trial.