Iranian authorities have freed a French Embassy employee on trial in Iran from a Tehran prison, President Nicolas Sarkozy's office announced Tuesday, Associated Press reported.
Sarkozy hopes charges will be dropped against Nazak Afshar, a French-Iranian, and that another French citizen on trial, 24-year-old academic Clotilde Reiss, will be quickly returned home, a statement said.
The release of Afshar, an employee in the embassy's cultural section, appeared as surprising as her arrest, which France learned about only after seeing her on television during filming of the mass trial Saturday.
Sarkozy credited France's EU partners "and other countries, specifically naming Syria, as among those "who provided their support in this first phase."
France had said it had been using all available contacts in an effort to free the two, who it had said were unjustly suspected of roles in the postelection unrest that engulfed Iran.
Sarkozy spoke with Afshar "as soon as she left prison," the statement said.
Details of Syria's role in the release of Afshar were not immediately clear. Iran is a strong ally of Syria, and Sarkozy has strengthened France's ties with Damascus.
Sarkozy visited Damascus in January, meeting with President Bashar Assad as part of an international bid at the time to stop an Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip - his second visit there.
Sarkozy first went to Syria in September 2008 in a bid to forge stronger ties between France and its former colony. Sarkozy has backed a go-between role for Damascus to bring across Western demands on Tehran.
Afshar cried as she admitted in court Saturday she was involved in postelection disturbances and said "brothers at the Intelligence Ministry made me understand my mistake," the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported.
Reiss also apologized before the court for attending at least one demonstration but did so because she was curious. She has been charged with acting against national security by joining protests, gathering information, taking photos and sending them abroad during postelection unrest in Iran.
French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said Sunday that such an admission was "worked on," suggesting that it had been coerced.
A sense of optimism over the case of Reiss and Afshar has been gaining ground in France in recent days.
Iran's ambassador to France said earlier Tuesday that Tehran was offering a conditional release to Reiss.
Seyeb Mehdi Miraboutalebi said on French radio RFI that Iran's vice minister for foreign affairs told judicial authorities that Reiss could be freed if she resides in the French Embassy in Tehran during the rest of the trial.
Miraboutalebi said France's ambassador has not yet responded to the offer. The French Foreign Ministry has had no comment.
The Iranian ambassador said Tehran is seeking to "create favorable conditions" for Reiss, arrested July 1 after attending opposition demonstrations in Iran. She had spent five months teaching in Isfahan.
She is among more than 100 suspects in the mass trial.