PARIS - Two French journalists who had been smuggled out of Syria flew to France on Friday, a week after one of them suffered injuries in the restive central Syrian city of Homs, officials said.
Edith Bouvier and William Daniels were taken on a medically equipped plane, said airport officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media. Francois Abi Saab, a French Embassy spokeswoman, confirmed the two journalists left Lebanon.
Earlier Friday, a senior Lebanese security official said Bouvier and Daniels were smuggled across the Lebanese-Syrian border into the northeastern part of Lebanon's Bekaa Valley. Bouvier was then taken to the Hotel-Dieu de France hospital in Beirut.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy is to greet the returning journalists at the military airport of Villacoublay outside Paris.
Meanwhile, the Paris prosecutor's office opened a preliminary investigation Friday for murder following the Feb. 22 death of French photographer Remi Ochlik and attempted murder for Bouvier.
Bouvier, 31, was wounded in a rocket attack during a government onslaught on the rebel-held neighbourhood of Baba Amr. The attack killed two Western journalists -- American reporter Marie Colvin and Ochlik -- and wounded a British photographer, Paul Conroy. Daniels was not hurt in the attack.
On Friday evening, Red Cross spokesman Bijan Farnoudi told The Associated Press that the organization had been handed the remains of Ochlik and Colvin and would be transporting them to Damascus. The French prosecutor's office said identifying and returning Ochlik's body to France was a goal of its investigation.
A video posted online by activists soon after the attack showed Bouvier lying on a hospital gurney with a white cast stretching from her left ankle to her thigh. In another video, Bouvier said her leg was broken in two places and that she needed an operation that local medics couldn't perform. Daniels stood at her side and pleaded for help.
"It is difficult here. We don't have electricity. We don't have much to eat. The bombs continue to fall," he said.
The security official, speaking on Friday on condition of anonymity in line with regulations, said the convoy of ambulances and police vehicles drove through the mountains of Lebanon amid a heavy snow storm to bring Bouvier to Beirut.
In a video obtained by AP before Bouvier was taken to Beirut's Hariri Airport in an ambulance, she was seen in her hospital bed looking in good condition.
Sarkozy announced late Thursday that Bouvier and Daniels had been successfully smuggled into Lebanon.
"I had (Bouvier) on the phone. She is with her colleague, outside Syria," Sarkozy said during an impromptu news briefing in Brussels. "She has suffered a lot, but she will give the details herself."
French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe expressed his "immense joy" that the two were safe in Lebanon. "They were taken in by the French Embassy in Beirut and everything is being done to ensure their medical care and their repatriation as soon as possible," Juppe said.
Also stuck in the rebel-held neighbourhood, which has been under a tight government siege and daily shelling for nearly four weeks, was Javier Espinosa of Spain. He, too, was smuggled into Lebanon this week.
He described life in the neighbourhood during the siege.
"The people just hide during the day -- just waiting not to be hit because it was a matter of luck," he said in an interview with BBC. "There was no logic. They were shelling randomly, randomly from one corner to the other corner in the neighbourhood."
He said people would only go out after dark.
"They went outside at night and tried to pick up the pieces of houses that were demolished and get some food and try to get some supplies for people inside that could not move."
On Thursday, videos released by activists in Syria said Colvin and Ochlik were buried in Baba Amr. But the Syrian government obscured the picture by saying it had disinterred their bodies and would repatriate them.
The videos and Bouvier's and Daniels' escape were steps toward the end of the ordeal of the six journalists who had sneaked into Syria illegally to report on the uprising against President Bashar Assad and found themselves trapped inside the besieged Homs neighbourhood of Baba Amr.
The Syrian government has prevented most reporters from working in the country, and many journalists have been crossing into Syria illegally from Lebanon and Turkey.
The Baba Amr section of Homs has been the target of the heaviest Syrian military shelling during a four-week siege of rebel-held parts of Homs. Rebel forces said Thursday they were pulling out of the neighbourhood, and a Syrian government official said the army had moved in. Activists say hundreds have been killed in Homs.
