An Iranian assassin walked free from a French prison and flew home on Tuesday amid controversy over whether his release was tied to that of a French academic freed by Tehran three days earlier. Ali Vakili Rad had served 16 years for stabbing and strangling to death the deposed Shah's last prime minister, Shapour Bakhtiar, at the victim's home outside Paris in 1991.
After the French interior minister signed an order to deport Vakili Rad, a court granted him parole on Tuesday and, a few hours later, he boarded an Iran Air flight from Paris' Orly airport to Tehran.
Vakili Rad was released just days after Iran sent French academic and alleged spy Clotilde Reiss home, triggering claims from opposition politicians that Paris had agreed to a quid pro quo with Tehran. "This must not be seen as an exchange," the agent's lawyer Sorin Margulis told reporters. "The Reiss affair did nothing but complicate and delay my client's release." But an Iranian rights activist representing Bakhtiar's family accused France of "negotiating with a terrorist state" and agreeing to release the perpetrator of a brutal killing using kitchen knives.