Olivier Grondeau, a traveler from Paris, has been held hostage in Iran for
more than two years. He was arbitrarily arrested during a visit to the city of Shiraz on October 12, 2022, then incarcerated in the prisons of Shiraz and Evin (in Tehran), and had until now wished to avoid media coverage of his situation. This former junior Scrabble champion, avid reader and writer went on a hunger strike in January 2024 in the absence of any prospect of a trial date. On February 19, he was sentenced to five years in prison for "gathering information with a view to handing it over to the opposing espionage service," charges he categorically denies. The sentence was confirmed on appeal in May.

His conditions of detention are particularly precarious: Olivier is entitled to weekly calls to his parents and calls to Iranian numbers according to arbitrarily allocated time slots. Having exhausted other options, he decided to lift his anonymity, like the two other French nationals held by the mullahs's regime, Cécile Kohler and Jacques Paris, on whose behalf he is also speaking out.

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