After spending months deprived of her freedom, the Franco-Iranian academic, Fariba AdelkhahReturn to Paris. The researcher, 69 years old, had been arrested in June 2019 along with her partner, Roland Marchaland sentenced to five years in prison in May 2020. She was accused of national security charges, which her supporters denounced as absurd.
At first, he spent five months behind bars, until October of that year, when he was released from prison with electronic bracelet monitoring, for a limited time. This benefit was valid until January 2022 and from then, until February 2023, she was again deprived of her liberty.
After four and a half years in detention, and thanks to the support of the group that fought for her release, she finally managed to end her sentence although she did not receive permission to leave the country until now.
“It is essential that Mrs. Fariba Adelkhah can regain all her freedoms, including the right to return to France if she so wishes. “France reiterates its demand for the immediate and unconditional release of all French citizens arbitrarily detained in Iran,” the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had indicated in a statement in February.
Thus, his arrival in Paris this Tuesday was pure joy. Adelkhah was received at the airport by Béatrice Hibou, president of the support committee in favor of her release, and Mathias Vicherat, director of the institute Sciences Po, where he works researching Iranian Shiite religion and politics.
“After so many years deprived of liberty, what a great emotion to finally welcome home our colleague Fariba, symbol of our battle for academic freedom”, celebrated Vicherat and thanked the “tireless” efforts of the French authorities to achieve his departure from Iran. The researcher, for her part, commented that, beyond the joy of her situation, she thinks “of my former companions imprisoned in Evin and in my French compatriots (…) who have not yet regained their freedom.”
Adelkhah was one of two dozen foreign citizens detained by the Tehran regime which, according to the West, supports a strategy with which they then seek get concessions in exchange for his release.
Among them was her husband, Marchalwho was released in March 2020 in an exchange that involved the release of the Iranian engineer Jalal Rohollahnejadclaimed by the United States.
Also, the same number of foreign prisoners were arbitrarily detained in recent years and released in recent months, such as the five American prisoners who arrived in Washington in exchange for the release of billions of dollars in Iranian funds that had been frozen.
However, the authorities still have under their power four other French citizens -professor Cecile Kohler, her partner Jacques Paris, the traveler Louis Arnaud, and a man identified as Oliver- which has led to a considerable increase in tension between the nations.
In that sense, in a communication this last weekend, the president Emmanuel Macron “reiterated his deep concern” for the detainees and demanded that his counterpart Ebrahim Raisi his immediate release.
(With information from EFE and AFP)
Source-www.infobae.com