President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife, Carla, were among a crowd of about 100 people greeting the journalists, Stéphane Taponier and Hervé Guesquière, at the Villacoublay air base near Paris.
The journalists, who both work for state-run television France 3, were abducted in December 2009 with their Afghan translator, Reza Din. The circumstances involving their release remained unclear, with the Taliban claiming that several of their conditions had been met while the French foreign minister denied that any ransom had been paid.
On Thursday, the journalists appeared tired but exultant.
“We’re fine, we’ve been in good spirits,” a smiling Mr. Guesquière told reporters during a news conference at the air base. Though the men described the conditions of their captivity as harsh, Mr. Guesquière added, “We weren’t mistreated, we weren’t beaten or tied up.”
Mr. Taponier, an experienced cameraman who has worked in conflict zones such as Gaza and Iraq, said that during his captivity he never lost faith.
“We didn’t know how long this would last, but we were ready to hold out more,” he said.
Mr. Guesquière said the men’s movement was limited, and that they ate “typical ‘afghan mountain’ food, in very little quantities, and always the same.”
The two journalists said that they had been transferred to many different places and had been separated for eight months, from April to December 2010.
Mr. Guesquière told reporters during later news conference at the headquarters of France 3 that they were kidnapped after passing a checkpoint that had been infiltrated by a Taliban informant.
“From what we know,” Mr. Guesquière said, “if we hadn’t been intercepted at the first ambush, there would have been a second one, and then a third, and if we didn’t stop, they would have received an order to kill us because for them, we were spies.”
The newspaper Le Monde wrote on Thursday that the negotiations had been “improbable” and long, because of the hostages’ frequent transfers and “internal rivalries among local insurgents, in particular tensions between Talibans and the fundamentalist Hebz-e-islami group,” which delayed their release.
A spokesman for the Taliban also said Thursday that part of the reason the men had been held so long was that the French government refused to meet the captors’ demands. A few hours after the men were released, the spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, said that “France had finally been encouraged to accept our conditions,” and “consented to release a number of mujahidin commandants in exchange for the journalists’ freedom.”
But French officials remained silent about the reasons why the two journalists were released after 18 months of negotiations and denied that a ransom was paid.
“France doesn’t pay ransoms,” Alain Juppé, the foreign affairs minister, said on Wednesday. The French Embassy in Kabul, the Afghan capital, declined to comment.
Rod Nordland contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.
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