Not a hothead but a thoughtful professional. This is how his relatives describe Vahid Shamsoddinnezhad, 30, an Iranian journalist who graduated in France, arrested while covering the protests that have rocked his country for several weeks.
After more than a month of detention, it was finally Arte, his current employer, who revealed the detention of the young father of the family by the Iranian authorities. The journalist was arrested in Saquez, in Iranian Kurdistan, on September 28. Arriving four days earlier, he only had time to conduct two telephone interviews and a video subject before being arrested.
“It’s difficult to film but I’m careful”
The man who had been a French-Persian translator for his country’s national football team and a fixer for the French media in Iran ended up falling in love with the language of Molière. Above all, Vahid wants to pursue his dream: to become a journalist. “He says he was tired of doing the work for other journalists, that he wanted to do the work himself,” says Camille Bouju, 23, one of his class colleagues.
Vahid arrives in France in 2020 and becomes the eldest of the promotion of the 96th promotion of the Graduate School of Journalism of Lille (ESJ Lille), from which he graduated since the start of the school year.
To complete his degree in the “international journalism” section of his school, the 30-year-old became an apprentice in the audiovisual editorial staff of StudioFact. “He was really focused on his project of becoming a correspondent in his country,” notes his friend Camille.
“Quiet, gentle, considerate,” and maybe even a little more mature than his younger classmates. Above all, since the spring of 2021, the young man is the father of a little Ali, who lives in Paris with his mother.
This summer, the student had gone to his country for “magazine” subjects, on a fisherwoman, in particular. But when the repression breaks out, he decides to go back to cover the events. If the news is hot, the young journalist, who graduated only a few weeks ago, takes all the necessary precautions. “Vahid Shamsoddinnezhad filed, on September 24, 2022, ARTE’s accreditation letter as well as the details of his French press card with the authorities in Tehran,” Arte said in a press release.
“He is a very calm, very calm person. Not the type to leave the flower with the gun on a subject ”, confirms Samuel Ravier, journalist with L’Humanité, one of his classmates. “To Camille, Vahid had moreover confided from Iran: “It is difficult to film but I am careful”.
Since his incarceration, the young man has given very little news to his family. The exact places of his detention are not yet known.