Saw Anderson, Freed French Hostage Says

PARIS — A freed French hostage said today that he had shared a cell with American Terry Anderson during his captivity in Lebanon.

Asked by a French television reporter how he felt, Marcel Fontaine replied: “We survived.”

“I passed the time playing dominoes and chess with my cellmate,” he added.

Asked who his companion was, Fontaine replied, “The American, Terry Anderson.”

Anderson, 40, chief Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press, is the longest held of the hostages. He was kidnaped March 16, 1985.

Anderson’s sister, Peggy Say, said she was encouraged and planned to contact the Frenchman and ask “what Terry is thinking and dreaming about, what his hopes are. How he’s surviving.” She spoke in a telephone interview from her home in Batavia, N.Y.

Fontaine, Marcel Carton and journalist Jean-Paul Kauffmann arrived in Paris today after being freed a day earlier.

Premier Jacques Chirac said Iran intervened to free the Frenchmen. He said normal relations with Iran, broken July 17, “could be envisaged.”

Iran said it intervened for “humanitarian reasons.”

Interior Minister Charles Pasqua told reporters that no money was paid to free the hostages and that France did not negotiate with the captors. But a Syrian mediator, Omran Adham, said in Geneva that France repaid $670 million in borrowed money to Iran and made other compensation to the kidnapers.

Diplomats Carton, 62, Fontaine, 45, and journalist Kauffmann, 44, arrived at the military airport of Villacoublay in a special government jet.

“It’s an incredible day,” Kauffmann said, looking thin but healthy. “But it’s also a day which remains overshadowed because we are just three.”

He then recalled Western hostages still being held in Beirut “leading that nightmare life.”

Carton said the three saw other hostages, but did not know who they were.

Also Thanks Syrian

Chirac also thanked Syrian President Hafez Assad and Lebanese military authorities for their help in gaining freedom for the hostages, who were held by pro-Iranian extremists.

“As we all know, the liberation of our hostages falls into the framework of our relations with Iran,” Chirac said. “It’s the authorities in Tehran who intervened with the captors so that they freed our countrymen.”