VIDEO. The sister of Benjamin Brière, one of the two French detainees in Iran, confided in “Special Envoy” just before his release

He will be able to go home, and this time for good. Along with another Frenchman arbitrarily detained in Iran, Benjamin Brière was released today, the Quai d’Orsay announced. “Our compatriots Benjamin Brière and Bernard Phelan, detained until then in Iran, are on their way to France this Friday, May 12”says the press release from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Accused of espionage (like his compatriots Cécile Kohler and Jacques Paris), this French tourist will have spent three years in an Iranian prison. He had been arrested in May 2020, while he was on a world tour started two years earlier. The regime accuses him of photos taken with a drone in a prohibited area. The 37-year-old globetrotter was then visiting a natural park in the north of the country.

“An ultra-violent emotional lift”

From judicial developments to intense disappointments, his sister Blandine, between hope and concern, had confided in “Special Envoy” shortly before this release. Initially sentenced to eight years in prison and eight months, his brother had received the news of his acquittal for the first time. On February 15, Blandine learned of it by email, confirmed by a phone call from her lawyer. “He had really believed that his ordeal was going to end”, she says. On the phone, his brother is overjoyed: he heard his release announced over the prison loudspeakers. But in reality, that moment had not yet arrived…

“He had passed the last door of the prison, and he was asked to turn around and go back to the cell.”

Blandine Brière, sister of a Frenchman detained in Iran for three years

to “Special Envoy”

Benjamin Briere then went on a hunger strike to protest his detention. He was scheduled to be tried by an appeal court on June 12.

In Lyon, his sister shared this life of anguish and endless waiting with the family of another hostage. That of Cécile Kohler, a Strasbourg teacher arrested in Tehran with her companion Jacques Paris, during a tourist stay. Unlike Benjamin Brière, the couple had been forced to make false confessions. They are still being held in Iran…

Excerpt from “French in the hands of the mullahs”, a report which will be broadcast exceptionally on May 12, 2023 at 8:30 p.m.

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