BBC Online :
French journalists released from captivity in Syria have been speaking about their ordeal at the hands of suspected Islamist rebels.
Didier Francois said the four men were chained to each other and kept in basements without natural light.
His colleague Nicolas Henin added that they were “not always well treated”.
Mr Henin and Mr Francois, along with Edouard Elias and Pierre Torres, were greeted by their families and President Francois Hollande on arrival in France.
They had been found by Turkish soldiers on the Syrian border late on Friday.
The jihadist group Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) has been accused of kidnapping them.
Television footage after their reappearance showed the men looking unkempt, with beards and long hair, but in good health.
Mr Francois, 53, said he was “very happy to be free… to see the sky, to be able to walk and to be able to speak freely”.
“We spent six whole months in basements without seeing daylight, and for two-and-a-half months we were chained to each other,” he told his own radio station, Europe 1.
“It was a long haul, but we never lost hope,” Mr Francois added. “From time to time, we got snatches of information, we knew that the world was mobilised.”
The journalists were found blindfolded and handcuffed in a no-man’s land in Turkey’s border province of Sanliurfa and were taken by Turkish soldiers to a police station in the nearby town of Akcakale.
