Briefly

IRAN

French Embassy employee freed

PARIS | Iranian authorities have freed a French Embassy employee on trial in Iran from a Tehran prison, President Nicolas Sarkozy’s office announced Tuesday.

Mr. Sarkozy hopes charges will be dropped against Nazak Afshar, a French-Iranian, and that another French citizen on trial, academic Clotilde Reiss, 24, will be quickly returned home, a statement said.

The release of Ms. 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.

Mr. Sarkozy credited France’s EU partners and Syria for help in the release.

SYRIA

U.S. security team to visit

DAMASCUS | A U.S. security delegation will visit Syria on Wednesday in a sign of growing cooperation between the two countries since President Obama started talking with the Damascus government, diplomats said.

The delegation will mainly discuss Syrian moves to curb infiltration into neighboring Iraq and insurgent networks Washington says are operating from Syria, diplomats in the Syrian capital said.

Security cooperation on Iraq has been a main goal of the U.S. rapprochement with Syria, which has led to U.S. support for resuming peace talks between Syria and Israel and an announcement that Washington would send back an ambassador to Damascus after a four-year break.

A State Department official confirmed the visit, the second since June, and said the delegation would be headed by a general from the U.S. Central Command.

SAUDI ARABIA

TV bureaus shut after sex talk

RIYADH | Authorities in Saudi Arabia have shut down all local operations of a Lebanese TV station that broadcast an interview with a Saudi man who spoke frankly about sex, a government official said Tuesday.

Abdul-Rahman al-Hazza, spokesman of the Ministry of Culture and Information, said a second office of the Lebanese-based LBC satellite station, in Riyadh, was closed Monday because of the July 15 program. LBC’s other Saudi bureau, in the western city of Jidda, was shut Saturday.

The Saudi man, Mazen Abdul-Jawad, was detained July 31 for questioning. His interview shocked many in this conservative country where such frank talk is rarely heard in public.

Mr. Abdul-Jawad, a 32-year-old Saudi Airlines employee, has begged for forgiveness from Saudi society for appearing on LBC’s “Bold Red Line” program.

The television segment begins with Mr. Abdul-Jawad apparently talking about the first time he had sex — at age 14 with a neighbor. Then the divorced father of four sons leads viewers into his bedroom where he says: “Everything happens in this room.”

More than 200 people have filed legal complaints against Mr. Abdul-Jawad, dubbed a “sex braggart” by the media, and many Saudis say he should be severely punished.

IRAN

Opposition says 69 died in unrest

TEHRAN | Iran’s opposition said Tuesday it had verified the deaths of 69 people in the two months of unrest since the disputed presidential election, confirming suspicions that the death toll was at least more than double the official figure.

Human rights groups have said throughout the crisis that they believe the death toll in the crackdown on protesters is far higher than the official Iranian count. But establishing a detailed picture of the number of casualties and their identities has been made difficult by restrictions on journalists and a reported prohibition on public mourning ceremonies.

A senior aide to Mir Hossein Mousavi, the opposition leader who claims he was the true winner of the June 12 presidential vote, delivered a list of the dead to parliament.

From wire dispatches and staff reports