PARIS, 23 December 2004 — The two French journalists freed in Iraq after four months as hostages were greeted with hugs and kisses from overjoyed relatives as soon as they arrived at a Paris military airbase.

Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot were immediately in the arms of their mothers, who were waiting on the rain-slicked tarmac of the Villacoublay airport just outside the capital.

President Jacques Chirac, who was also waiting, stood back a few moments to let other kin welcome the reporters with kisses and long embraces before stepping up to welcome them and head inside the terminal building with them.

Chesnot and Malbrunot made no immediate comment to the media which captured their arrival. The pair had been flown to Paris on board a French airforce jet which picked them up in Cyprus, where they had arrived earlier in the day from Baghdad on board a larger airforce transport aircraft.

Speaking earlier on television, Chirac talked of a national mood of “joy,” adding: “They have gone through a very tough ordeal,” he said.

Relatives were ecstatic. “The nightmare is over, we are going to be able to resume a normal life,” Malbrunot’s 70-year-old mother, Andree, told AFP at her home in central France.

“We’re going to have a happy Christmas.”

Chesnot, 37, a freelancer who was working for Radio France Internationale, and Malbrunot, 41, filing for leading French daily Le Figaro, were kidnapped south of Baghdad on Aug. 20, together with their Syrian driver, by a group calling itself the Islamic Army in Iraq.

The insurgent group said it released them because of France’s stand against the US-led invasion of Iraq and their own support for Palestinian statehood, according to a statement given to Al-Jazeera television.

It had also been proved that they were not spying for US forces in Iraq, it added.

Chirac credited their release to national solidarity and “the responsible and tenacious action of the government and all the services which mobilized with determination and efficiency.”

A witness at the airport in Paphos where the reporters were transferred to the 14-seater Falcon jet for Paris said they appeared “in good health.” He said Barnier met them after they stepped down from the French Hercules transport plane from Baghdad, a moment that “was moving and sober at the same time.”

Raffarin told a group of political leaders yesterday there was “neither a demand nor a payment” of a ransom for their release, the leader of the French Communist Party in the senate said after he briefed politicians.

Another participant at the meeting, Jean-Paul Cluzel, head of the state-run Radio France which employed Chesnot, said Raffarin “stressed that there was no condition attached to their liberation because they (the insurgents) demanded none.”

The premier made no public comment on any ransom or the negotiations, only that France’s “friendship of the Iraqi people” had aided their release.

Cluzel said the prime minister told him the journalists were “apparently in good physical and psychological state.”

“It appears they don’t need any particular psychological treatment,” Cluzel added, saying they had apparently been treated “decently” by their captors.

Jubilation swept France, where the journalists’ plight had been kept in the public eye by a well-organized solidarity campaign to which representatives of the country’s five-million strong Muslim community lent strong support.

France had felt its position against the US-led war and traditionally good ties with Arab states might have earned it more sympathy from insurgents, but as weeks turned into months, the situation became baffling.