2024-01-02 14:42:53
Santiago Sánchez Cogedor is already in Spain after being released last Sunday from the Iran prison where he has been detained for almost 15 months.
As his mother, Celia Cogedor, reported on Monday, the plane from Dubai in which the Spanish adventurer was traveling landed in T4 of the Madrid-Barajas airport after 1:15 p.m.
After hugging all the family and friends who had come to receive him, Cogedor was moved and claimed to have feared for his life: “They wanted to sentence me to death,” a friend was heard saying upon his arrival.
Afterwards, the adventurer spoke to the media who were waiting for him at the terminal, in front of whom he read a letter that the Iranian prisoners dedicated to him before his departure. “It has been very hard and very long, but I am here. We do not know how lucky we are to have been born in this country,” he declared and added that “holding hatred and holding a grudge is cowardly.” “Do you know that the sentence was the death penalty? Well, words are unnecessary,” he added.
His mother, Celia Cogedor, also spoke to the media from the airport minutes before hugging her son again. She reported that yesterday she was able to talk to him, who calmed her down. “Mom, calm down, the worst is over, you know the joy I feel for using suffering to help others,” she told her. She has admitted feeling relieved: “The nightmare is over,” she said. “He is very thin, he has aged, but he is going to use the suffering to help others. The worst were the first months. In prison he left friends, 500 prisoners blanketed him and wrote him a farewell letter when he left,” has added.
Hours before meeting her son again, Celia had also valued the help of Ángel Losada Fernández, the Spanish ambassador in Tehran. Speaking to the media while she awaited the arrival of her son, she maintained that without her help her son would not have been able to return home and added that “he has behaved like a father.”
“He has done the possible and the impossible, last night he was with him until he left him on the plane and he did not go home until the plane took off,” he stressed.
“He is an extraordinary being (…) and we are convinced that, if it is not for him, my son will not come out, but he will not come out for years, because the next appointment he had for the judge to see him was in January 25,” stood out.
Cogedor has also thanked the work carried out by the Government, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation, and the Embassy in Iran, which he said “have juggled so that this exit occurs in such a turbulent country.”
More than a year in an Iranian prison
On October 2, 2022, Sánchez Cogedor was on a walking route to Doha to attend the Football World Cup in Qatar and, while passing through Iran, specifically through the Kurdish city of Saqqez, he was arrested for visiting and photographing the young woman’s grave. Mahsa Amini, whose death for wearing the veil incorrectly caused strong protests in the country itself, and much of the world, which died out after a strong repression that caused 500 deaths, thousands of arrests and several executions of protesters. It was at this time that he was arrested, accused of espionage, which in Iran received the death penalty.
His release was announced on Sunday in a message on the social network
The release was carried out, according to Iran, “within the framework of friendly and historical relations between the two countries and in compliance with laws.”
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