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Iranian state television aired a video on Thursday in which two French citizens detained for “spying” in May are shown “confessing” to acting on behalf of a French security service. The video, which France’s foreign ministry denounced as both “shameful” and “staged”, was broadcast amid weeks of protest in Iran that authorities have tried to blame on foreign enemies.
The video released by the Iranian state-run IRNA news agency showed a French couple, Cécile Kohler and Jacques Paris. Both have been accused of seeking to stir labour unrest during Iranian teachers’ strikes earlier this year.
Kohler and Paris are associated with the National Federation of Education, Culture and Vocational Training, a French teachers’ union, which told Reuters in May they were on a tourist visit to Iran.
France’s foreign ministry condemned the video confessions in an unusually harshly worded statement.
“Cécile Kohler and Jacques Paris have been arbitrarily detained in Iran since May 2022, and as such are state hostages,” said the French foreign ministry at the Quai d’Orsay.
“The staging of their supposed confessions is shameful, revolting, unacceptable and contrary to international law,” the ministry added.
It was the first time the ministry had described French nationals detained in Iran as “state hostages” and the first time the pair have been officially named by France.
The clips aired Thursday resembled other videos of confessions Tehran has forced prisoners to make. Kohler, wearing a headscarf, says, “I am Cécile Kohler, I am an intelligence and operations agent at the DGSE (France’s Directorate General for External Security) …We were in Iran to prepare the ground for the revolution and the overthrow of the regime of Islamic Iran.”
Iran announced on May 11 the arrest of two Europeans “who entered the country with…
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Source : france24
