It was close to noon in Tehran on June 23 when Cécile Kohler heard the first explosion. The sound of a second, then a third, soon followed. The walls of the tiny cell in Evin prison, where the literature teacher has been locked up for three years, shook. Just a few meters away, in the men's section, Jacques Paris, her 72-year-old partner who was arrested with her in May 2022, grew frantic as fellow inmates were wounded by shrapnel and shards of glass. Chaos and panic ensued. The guards gathered the political prisoners from Section 209, tied them together in pairs, and transferred them to Tehran-Bozorg penitentiary in the south of the capital, as Israeli bombs continued to rain down on the city. "I thought I was going to die," Kohler later told the chargé d'affaires at the French embassy in Iran during a consular visit granted a week later on July 1. Since the Israeli strikes, their actual place of detention is unknown.

Terrified by the attacks, the 40-year-old woman was barely sleeping. "Every night, she hears explosions," her sister Noémie Kohler said by phone. Are they phantom noises or real gunfire? The family lives in anxiety and uncertainty. After three years in detention, Kohler and Paris were indicted in late June by a revolutionary court for "espionage on behalf of Mossad [Israeli intelligence services]," "plotting to overthrow the government" and "corruption on earth" – charges that carry the death penalty. Is there any hope for release? "We no longer believe in it," sighed Noémie Kohler. The couple has now been joined by Lennart Monterlos, an 18-year-old French-German cyclist, arrested "for an offense," according to Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghtchi in an interview with Le Monde on July 10, without providing further details. A fourth French citizen has recently been arrested in Iran, Le Monde has learned, though neither the Iranian authorities nor Paris has disclosed any information

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