In a recording broadcast Thursday, a young woman speaking in French claims to be called Cécile Kohler and being an agent of the DGSE.
Le Monde with AFP
The Al-Alam Arabic-speaking channel site of official Iranian television broadcast, Thursday, October 6, which it presents as “confessions” of espionage of two French people arrested in May in Iran. In the video, a young woman speaking in French claims to be called Cécile Kohler and being an operational intelligence agent at the Directorate General of External Security (DGSE, French intelligence service).
The woman affirms that she and her spouse were in Iran “to prepare the conditions of the revolution and the reversal of the Iranian regime”. They had to, according to his statements, were still funding strikes and demonstrations and even using weapons “if necessary to fight against the police”. According to the man shown in the video, which is also expressed in French, the objectives of the DGSE were to “put pressure on the government” Iranian.
Iran had announced on May 11 the arrest of two Europeans “entered the country in order to trigger chaos and destabilize the company”. The French authorities then denounced an “baseless” arrest and requested their “immediate liberation”. Tehran then accused at the beginning of July of “attack on the security” of the country two “French trade unionists” arrested in May.
of external forces
A French trade union source had identified them as Cécile Kohler, a head of the FNEC FP-FO teacher union (National Federation of Teaching, Culture and Vocational Training-For Ouvrière), and her spouse, Jacques Paris. She specified that they were doing tourism in Iran during the Easter holidays at the time of their arrest.
This broadcast occurs against the background of a wave of demonstrations in Iran launched on September 16 by the death of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, after her arrest by the Police of Manners. Iran has repeatedly accused external forces of stirring protests and said last week that nine foreign nationals had been arrested.
More than a dozen nationals from Western countries, mostly binational, are detained or blocked in Iran, which non -governmental organizations condemn as a hostage -taking policy to obtain concessions from the foreign powers. Among them are the Franco-Iranian researcher Fariba Adelkhah, arrested in June 2019 then sentenced to five years in prison for national security involvement, which his relatives have always denyed fiercely, as well as Benjamin Brière, arrested in May 2020 and sentenced to Eight years and eight months’ imprisonment for espionage, what he disputes.