France refused Monday to release an Iranian agent jailed for the murder of a former prime minister in exchange for the freedom of a young French academic charged with inciting street protests. Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner insisted that Paris would not bow to what he said was pressure from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to swap 24-year-old Clotilde Reiss's freedom for that of Iranian convict Ali Vakili Rad.
"What does he want? He wants to make us swap Clotilde Reiss for Vakili Rad, that's to say the assassin of Shapour Bakhtiar. It's out of the question," Kouchner said, at a breakfast for foreign journalists in Paris. "Even if we wanted to, we couldn't," Kouchner said, citing France's laws about the independence of the judiciary, which sentenced Vakili Rad to life imprisonment in 1994, setting a minimum term of 18 years.
On Friday, Ahmadinejad said that he would like to allow Reiss to return to France, but that the decision would "depend on the French authorities". He did not specify what he wanted Paris to offer in exchange. In 1994, a French court found Vakili Rad guilty of murder after he admitted to carrying out the 1991 murder in the Paris suburbs of Bakhtiar, an Iranian exile who had served as prime minister under the former Shah of Iran.
Vakili Rad was arrested in Switzerland and extradited to France, where he said he had been sent by Iran's Islamic government to kill Bakhtiar, who was a target because he had worked under the ousted Shah's hated regime. Reiss was arrested in the wake of the protests that followed Iran's disputed presidential election in June, shortly before she was due to fly home after a six-month study and teaching visit to the Iranian city of Isfahan.