Released on June 12 from his cell in Evin prison, near Tehran, Louis Arnaud, a 35-year-old consultant, landed Thursday morning in Paris, where his family and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Stéphane Séjourné, were waiting for him.
Emmanuel Macron announced his release on Wednesday evening, urging Tehran to release ” without delay ” the three other French people still detained in this country. Louis Arnaud began a world tour in July 2022 which took him to Iran. He was arrested in September of the same year with other Europeans accused of having participated in the demonstrations following the death of Mahsa Amini, murdered by the moral police for a veil deemed “badly worn”. His traveling companions were quickly released, but Louis Arnaud remained in prison before being sentenced, in November 2023, to five years in prison for propaganda and endangering the security of the Iranian state.
This release comes as tension between Paris and Tehran has risen again following the arrest on June 4, by French police, of Bashir Biazar, a former senior official of the Iranian regime’s public television. The latter was placed in an administrative detention center pending his removal from the territory, presented as a “absolute emergency”. Having lived in France for two years, Bashir Biazar is accused by the Ministry of the Interior of being a “Iranian agent of influence linked to the intelligence services of the Islamic Republic of Iran”, according to the expulsion order issued against him.
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The Iranian Foreign Ministry quickly reacted and demanded his release. Contacted by The world, the Ministry of the Interior did not wish to comment on the situation of Bashir Biazar. On Wednesday, the premises of an Iranian opposition group in exile, the People’s Mojahedin Organization (PMOI), in Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône (Val-d’Oise), were searched by the police. , gendarmerie and Urssaf, according to information from LCI and the Parisian. Three people were arrested and placed in administrative detention for illegal presence in France.
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These events take place in an increasingly tense context between France and the Iranian authorities. Both for diplomatic reasons, but also because of the increasingly visible activism, according to our information, of the Iranian services on national territory, even if this has always been relatively supported. “Today, we are a notch higher”, underlines a security source. An activism which involves in particular the increasingly assertive surveillance of the Iranian diaspora in France. Operations which are sometimes denounced by people who have had the feeling of having been targeted, to the point of giving rise to reports to the French services, or even to the filing of a complaint.
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