Iran: Frenchman Benjamin Brière will be tried for “espionage”

At the end of the investigation, the prosecution confirmed the prosecution “and the prosecutor prepares the indictment and sends it to the Revolutionary Court for the continuation of the judicial process”, indicated Mr.^e Saïd Dehghan. Benjamin Brière is being held in Machhad, in northeastern Iran. These accusations are “incomprehensible”, said Sunday the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs in a reaction communicated to Agence France-Presse. Benjamin Brière “was on a tourist trip to Iran,” said the ministry, assuring that he was “not aware of any element likely to support” these Iranian accusations.

Photographs with a drone considered to be espionage

The announcement of the dismissal of Benjamin Brière on trial comes a few days after the publication by Point of an open letter from her sister, calling on French President Emmanuel Macron to obtain the release of this thirty-something, imprisoned according to her “without foundation” and who has become an “instrument of negotiations which exceeds him”.

According to M^e Dehghan, the Frenchman was the subject of two other charges which were not finally retained at the end of the investigation: “corruption on Earth”, one of the most serious charges of the Iranian penal code , punishable by death, and consumption of alcohol, punishable by flogging. Benjamin Brière, born in 1985, is accused of espionage for “photographs of prohibited areas” taken with a drone in a natural park in Iran, his lawyer continued. According to his sister, he was arrested while traveling through the Islamic Republic of Iran as a tourist, during a long campervan trip that began in 2018.