UPDATE: on 20 March 2020, on the eve of Nauroz, Roland Marchal was freed from prison, in exchange for the liberation of an Iranian engineer arrested in France for allegedly violating US sanctions on Iran. Although he has generally kept quiet since then, arriving in Coronavirus-confined France, he gave a moving interview to French public radio-TV on 8 April.
Fariba is still in prison (on 15 April) but apparently she’s feeling much better, not only physically but also for having been put in charge of the woman’s section of Evin Prison library, which she says ‘is not at all bad’.
Roland Marchal, probably the major French specialist on Somalia and the Horn of Africa, was taken hostage by Iran’s revolutionary guards, together with Fariba Adelkhah, another researcher belonging to the Centre de Recherches Internationales, to which I am also affiliated. Following is the text of the Fariba and Roland Support Committee, that we publish on the eve of the celebration of the Iranian revolution (11 Feb). We request the Iranian leader to free both researchers and all other prisoners in Iran who have been unjustly detained.
