Iranian freed by Germany says to write his story

TEHRAN (Reuters) - An Iranian man who spent 15 years in jail in Germany for the 1992 assassination of a group of dissident Kurdish leaders said on Tuesday he was innocent and that he would write a book to tell his side of the story.

Kazem Darabi arrived in Tehran late on Monday after German officials said he and his Lebanese accomplice, Abbas Rhayel, were granted early release from their life prison sentences, despite protests from Israel.

"In this book all the things, all the reasons for my arrest and release ... will be published," Darabi told Iranian news agencies at Tehran's airport, where he was welcomed by his family and a senior Foreign Ministry official.

Darabi and Rhayel were convicted in 1997 for killing the four Kurds in a Berlin restaurant, having spent five years in custody before and during the trial. The court said at the time they would spend a quarter of a century in jail.

Prosecutors in the trial infuriated Tehran and strained bilateral relations by saying Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had ordered the killings and then President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani had approved them.

Iran has always denied responsibility for the killings.

Darabi, who said the decision to free him showed his innocence, suggested some unnamed German writers had agreed to help with the book, which he said would take about a year to finish. He said it would be published first in German and then in Farsi.

He said 15 years of his and his family's lives had been wasted and that he had "decided to write the entire story ... from the beginning to the end."

The office of Germany's chief prosecutor decided in October there was no legal reason to delay the release and officials in Berlin said on Monday both were being flown out of the country.

Israeli authorities have long believed Lebanon's militant Hezbollah movement could have information on missing Israeli pilot Ron Arad's fate and hoped Darabi could help in solving the case, Israeli and German media have reported.

The government of Israel and the family of Arad, who went missing over Lebanon in 1986, had asked German Chancellor Angela Merkel to delay the release of the two men.

(Reporting by Zahra Hosseinian in Tehran and Louis Charbonneau in Berlin; Writing by Fredrik Dahl; Editing by Keith Weir)