France demands release of citizens held in Iran after Tehran floats prisoner swap

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00:00Now to one of our other top stories here on Peristoric, France's foreign minister has

00:03demanded the unconditional and immediate release of its nationals held in Iran.

00:07He also declined to comment on a possible prisoner exchange, and that is only fueling

00:13speculation that something may be in the works. Earlier, the Iranian foreign minister said that

00:17a deal was nearly complete. France has previously accused Iran of taking hostages to serve as

00:22blackmail to extract concessions from the West. For more, let's speak to our correspondent in

00:27Tehran. Saeed Azimi, hello to you, Saeed. France's foreign minister declining to comment, so the

00:33only information we have at the moment is coming out of Tehran. What more can you tell us?

00:40Well, William, yes, the information we have is only from Tehran and only from the Iranian

00:44foreign minister, but the information is very vague. He said that it's very close and it could

00:50materialize in the coming days, but he did not specify if the two French prisoners who were

00:58held, who are being held in prison, the notorious prison since 2022, are being included in the swap

01:06with the Iranian prisoner, Mathias Magliari, in France, or the recent German-French national who was

01:15detained in Tehran as well, is also part of a deal. We don't know anything about the terms of this deal,

01:23if there's any. We should also point out that this only has been confirmed by one side of the story,

01:30and we don't know if there is any sort of mediation with that, but this was very striking and very

01:37shocking for most of us because our earlier AFP said like two months ago that they were charged,

01:44the two prisoners in Iran, the French prisoners were charged with espionage from Mossad and also

01:49corruption on earth, which faces death sentences and death penalties, but they were never tried in

01:55court, so they were only charged and they were only accused of these crimes. But so far as I know,

02:00no trials were held for them.

02:02Yeah, and Saeed, the West so often accusing Iran of hostage diplomacy. So where does this fit into

02:09the broader context of negotiations over Iran's nuclear program?

02:14Well, we know that Jean-Albaro and Emmanuel Macron have repeatedly said that our relations with Iran will

02:23never be normal unless there are French prisoners in Iran. So I think this could be seen as part of

02:30the Iran E3 talks over the snapback mechanism, which will reimpose UN sanctions on Iran. And it's

02:38going to happen in 20 days, almost 20 days. So I think this could be part of the Iran appeasing to

02:46the French so that they could have one force in the E3 to delay the activation of snapback mechanism and

02:53delay the reimposition of UN sanctions on Iran.

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