Two other French nationals were arrested in Iran, bringing to seven the number of French detainees in the Islamic republic’s prisons, the newspaper reported on Saturday. the parisian the head of French diplomacy.
“We had concerns about two other compatriots and from the latest checks it appears that they are also detained,” said Catherine Colonna, saying that “blackmail” “should not work.” “It’s the wrong way to do it with France,” she added.
“We demand their immediate release, access to consular protection (…). My Iranian counterpart, with whom I had a long and difficult conversation, has promised to respect this right of access. fruit,’ he adds.
“We demand their immediate release, access to consular protection, that is, the right of consular visit to our compatriots,” the minister also declared.
Tehran publishes ‘confessions’ on video
Among the seven hostages are the Franco-Iranian researcher Fariba Adelkhah, arrested in June 2019 and later sentenced to five years in prison for undermining national security, Benjamin Brière, arrested in May 2020 and sentenced to eight years and eight months in prison. imprisonment for espionage, and two trade unionists, Cécile Kohler and Jacques Paris, arrested last May.
At the beginning of October, Tehran had released a video presented as “confessions” by the latter, which caused a virulent reaction from Paris, which had denounced an “undignified staging” and evoked for the first time “State hostages”.
In the video broadcast by the website of the official television channel in Arabic, al-Alam, a French-speaking young woman says her name is Cécile Kohler and she is an operational intelligence agent of the General Directorate of External Security (DGSE), the foreign intelligence services French.
The French called to leave the country
Since then, the Quai d’Orsay has urged French people passing through Iran to “leave the country as soon as possible given the risks of arbitrary detention to which they are exposed.”
More than twenty citizens of Western countries, the majority with dual nationality, are detained or stranded in Iran, which NGOs condemn as a hostage-taking policy to obtain concessions from foreign powers.
Citing an Iranian source, le figaro specifies that these two French citizens are being held in prisons in Tehran and that their detention dates back several months, that is, before the start of the demonstrations that have shaken the country since mid-September after the death of Mahsa Amni, a 22-year-old years. old Iranian Kurd, arrested three days earlier by the vice squad for violating the Islamic Republic’s strict dress code.
At least 326 protesters have been killed in the crackdown on the protest movement, Iran Human Rights, an Oslo-based NGO, said on Saturday.
Source: BFM TV
