A member of defunct French leftist guerrilla group Action Directe was freed on Saturday after serving more than two decades in jail for two assassinations in the 1980s, a judicial official said. Nathalie Menigon, 51, had been in jail since her arrest in 1987. She was convicted with three others of the killings of Georges Besse, then head of the carmaker Renault, and of military engineer Rene Audran.
Small but ultra-violent Action Directe claimed more than a dozen killings and scores of attacks, citing the struggle against "Western Imperialism", until its main leaders were arrested in a swoop on a farmhouse in 1987. Menigon left the Seysses prison near Toulouse in southwestern France without making any comment.
For the past year the conditions of her detention had been relaxed in preparation for her release. She spent every night in prison but was let out during the day to work as a horticulturalist.
While in jail in 1999, Menigon married Jean-Marc Rouillan, one of the other four Action Directe militants convicted for the Besse and Audran killings. Rouillan is still in jail in Marseille although he too has enjoyed more relaxed conditions since December and works as a copy editor in the city. Joelle Aubron, one of the other four, was freed in 2004 with a brain tumour. She died in 2006.
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