The ingredients include a huge haul of cocaine, imprisonment in a Caribbean jail cell and a daring transatlantic air escape back to Paris.

In what might almost be worthy of a modern-day reworking of Papillon – the story of a fugitive’s escape from the infamous prison colony of Devil’s Island – France is agog at the tale of two pilots who fled a 20-year imprisonment in the Dominican Republic by flying across the Atlantic.

Pascal Jean Fauret – who escaped with his fellow pilot and defendant, Bruno Odos – appeared at a news conference in Paris on Tuesday to tell his story after opting to flee rather than wait for a ruling on an appeal against a drug conviction.

“We’re dealing with a judicial system ... that condemned us to 20 years for the sole reason we were French,” said Fauret.

“I was imprisoned in an isolation cell for two weeks then ... in a cell of six square metres. They shaved my head,” added Fauret, who added that he did not have recourse to an inquiry.

Odos did not attend the news conference but both men have denied knowing that the private plane they had been hired to fly was carrying 26 suitcases of cocaine.

The pair were in the process of appealing against their convictions this year for involvement in bringing in a 700kg (1,500lb) shipment of cocaine in 2013.

They had protested their innocence since being arrested and their arrival in France on Saturday puts them in an unusual legal limbo. They had been barred from leaving the Caribbean nation pending the appeal.

Back in the Dominican Republic, the country’s attorney general, Francisco Domínguez Brito, said he had opposed allowing the the men to be released pending their appeal.

He added Dominican authorities were investigating how the pair managed to get away, and that he was in touch with French officials and would seek to have the pilots extradited.

Their lawyer, Jean Reinhart, said on Europe 1 radio on Tuesday that the two were in France and at the “disposition” of French justice in the hope of clearing their names. He did not give details about how they escaped.

“It is not true justice,” Reinhart said. “When you have an order that is illegal, you have to not respect it.”

He said the pilots were suffering from respiratory and dental problems but were “happy to be in their country” with their families.

BFM television claimed the pair left on a purported tourist cruise, then transferred to a larger boat with the help of a French politician, former naval officers and former intelligence agents – all “friends” of the pilots from their service in the French navy, the station alleged.

The two were then taken to the French Antilles, where they boarded a commercial flight for Paris, BFM reported. Their lawyer said the pair travelled under their real names.

An official with the French foreign ministry said the government had nothing to do with their escape from justice. The official was not authorised to be publicly named, according to ministry policy.