Jacques Paris and Cécile Kohler leave the Elysée Palace after their meeting with Emmanuel Macron.Image: keystone
Two French travelers were arbitrarily arrested and accused of espionage. Now they report on their almost four-year captivity in the notorious Evin Prison in Iran.
April 14, 2026, 5:24 p.mApril 14, 2026, 5:24 p.m
Cécile Kohler and Jacques Paris fulfilled a long-held wish when they traveled to Iran in April 2022 and visited the most beautiful Persian sites. For the return trip in May, they took a taxi to the airport outside Tehran. Suddenly they were slowed down by two vehicles. A man signaled to them: “You are not leaving.”
The two educational travelers were to spend 1,277 days in custody, most of the time in the infamous Evin Prison in the Iranian capital. There, the 72-year-old pensioner and the 41-year-old literature teacher were immediately separated. They were placed in isolation cells in Section 209.
Over the next seventeen months, they were to see each other only once – for four minutes. The couple told Paris radio station France-Inter on Tuesday, a few days after their happy return to Paris. “At the beginning I was alone in an empty cell for months. “I didn’t have my own clothes, I wasn’t even given a toothbrush and I had to sleep on the floor,” reported Cécile Kohler.
The worst thing was the fear. During each of the regular interrogations they were threatened with death. “If you don’t do what we want, we will hang you,” the couple heard again and again. “Later they will only find the powder of your bones.”
Total dehumanization
Then there was the uncertainty. Kohler and Paris were ordinary tourists, but they were described as spies who had met “terrorists.” “The regime needs scapegoats,” is how Jacques Paris explains the behavior of the Iranian secret service, which heads the feared Evin Section 209. «It is a process of total dehumanization. In order to get prisoners to confess, they try to break them.”
This doesn’t happen physically – the “white torture”, as Cécile Kohler calls psychological torture, lasted several years. “There was no daylight in my cell, only neon lamps that burned at night, so you couldn’t sleep.” The Alsatian didn’t see her own face for more than half a year. Destabilized, weakened, confused, she had to make a confession with her partner, the contents of which were recited to her.
According to Kohler, all of this is the goal of Iran’s hostage diplomacy: to arrest any travelers and foreigners and use them as a bargaining chip against concessions from enemy states. For a long time, the two Frenchmen were not charged at all. It was not until 2025 that they were convicted of corruption and “offenses against national security” in a sham trial under Islamic law. There was no evidence.
At that time, Cécile Kohler was no longer in solitary confinement. She shared a nine-square-meter cell with a varying number of Iranian women. Sometimes there were four of them, sometimes nine – and then they weren’t even able to stretch out on the floor to sleep.
The French woman began to learn Farsi so that she could converse with the other women. She also learned Homer’s Odyssey by heart so she could recite the songs to herself until she fell asleep. She also did a lot of sport, especially jogging, the woman said in a firm voice. When journalists asked how she was able to jog in the overcrowded prison cell, she said: “I ran in place.”
Bomb attack next to the prison
Jacques Paris in particular experienced the war in Iran first hand: a bomb exploded just a few meters from his cell. 79 people died; Paris almost suffocated from the smoke. But the former teacher got over that too. He ultimately survived because he heard that his relatives and friends had mobilized for his release.
Suddenly the time had come, and as always without any prior notice: the last two of seven French hostages in Iran were released. At least halfway: They were transferred to the French embassy, where they remained under house arrest for another five months. Only last week the ambassador was able to personally drive his compatriots across the border into Azerbaijan and there to Baku airport.
In Paris they met President Emmanuel Macron. It is unclear whether France paid the ransom. The timing of the release suggests that the regime in Tehran was prepared to make a gesture because France remains at a distance from the American-Israeli attack.
The couple does not comment on politics. She is happy about the “scent of freedom”; he says: «We didn’t let ourselves be broken. Because we wanted to bear witness.” (fwa)