This is a huge relief for their loved ones. French hostages Benjamin Brière and Franco-Irish Bernard Phelan have been released by Iran, the Quai d’Orsay announced on Friday May 12.
“Free, finally. Benjamin Brière and Bernard Phelan will find their loved ones. It’s a relief. I salute their release. Thank you to all those who worked for this outcome”, reacted, in the process, President Emmanuel Macron in a tweet.
During an exchange on Friday morning with her Iranian counterpart, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, the head of French diplomacy Catherine Colonna said in a press release that she had “recalled France’s determination so that the other French citizens still detained in Iran quickly regain their full freedom and benefit from their right to consular protection”. According to the Flightradar24 website, a Falcon 900 from Airlec, a specialist in aeromedical transport, took off from Mashhad at 2:50 p.m. local time (1:20 p.m. Paris time) for Paris-Le Bourget airport where it should land at the end of the day. .
Benjamin Brière, 38, was arrested in May 2020 for taking “photographs of prohibited areas” with a recreational drone in an Iranian natural park. He had always introduced himself as a tourist. He had been sentenced to eight years in prison for espionage before being acquitted in mid-February. Since then, he was still detained and had started a hunger strike.
“There is not sufficient evidence to establish the crime and the Court returns a verdict of acquittal”, specified at the time the court of appeal of the province of Khorasan-e-Razavi (north-east). “We are in total incomprehension,” said Blandine Brière, the prisoner’s sister. Since this decision, her brother was “in an emotional elevator”, she had told.
Consultant for a tour operator
The Franco-Irish Bernard Phelan, 64, was arrested on October 3, while he was on a study trip as part of his consulting activities for a tour operator, just days after the start. protests following the death of Mahsa Amini. He had been convicted of “providing information to an enemy country”, a charge he has always denied. He was being held in a cell in Mashhad, in the northeast of the country.
Last March, his sister Caroline Massé-Phelan asked for “his immediate release for humanitarian reasons”. “Bernard’s health is becoming very worrying and his vital prognosis is engaged”, she wrote, mentioning “his heart problems and his sight” which “are deteriorating in difficult detention conditions”, and “his mental state (which) sinking day by day into depression”.
He went on a hunger strike
Bernard Phelan had started a hunger and thirst strike in early January, before suspending it at the request of his family worried about a fatal outcome in the face of inflexible Iranian authorities. “At a first hearing on February 20, the judge sentenced him to 3 and a half years in prison but said he would be granted a pardon by the court on humanitarian grounds due to his age and poor condition. health”, underlined his sister.
“On February 26, Bernard was again presented in court, with 20 minutes’ notice and without his own lawyer but still a lawyer for the regime. He was told that he would not be pardoned and that his sentence had been increased. at 6.5 years old. No document of the legal proceedings has been published,” said Caroline Massé-Phelan.