“It has been very hard”. The Spanish adventurer Santiago Sánchez Cogedor, taken since 2022 in Iran and released last week, arrived in Madrid yesterday on a flight from Dubai.
Received at the airport by family and friends, Sánchez Cogedor admitted that he was “clueless” and referred to the harshness of captivity, despite the happy ending: “I don’t believe it, it’s been very long, very hard, but I’m here”, he celebrated. “We don’t know how lucky we are to have been born in this country,” he said.
“For 15 months I have been living with a possible death sentence, a suffering that cannot be imagined”, he added about his stay in prison, accused of espionage. “These things are mine, because holding hatred and grudges is not good”, he assured about the experience: “In life you have to unlearn many things”.
Likewise, the Madrid native read a letter written to him by the inmates of Evin in which they thank him for sharing what little he had: “You learned to be happy with little, and you shared that little with others. You taught us that you can enjoy what is bad, and that in the end it is surely not so bad. You passed the test of patience and solitude with your inner strength, respect and education with your daily constancy”, remember his colleagues.
Minutes before his arrival, Celia Cogedor, his mother, explained that she had prepared his favorite food for him: “He told me that he will use the suffering to help others, as he has always done,” indicated the woman, for whom her son was the object of a deception by an opponent of the Iranian regime. “When he entered Iran he had a contact. And it seems that he was an opponent of the regime. He caught him, tricked him and took him to the grave so that he could take the photo as a foreigner and send it on social networks”, he said about the arrest, which took place “immediately”.
Celia Cogedor thanked the Spanish Government and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, for their involvement, and highlighted the role of the ambassador to Iran, Ángel Losada, who behaved “like a father” and to do “the possible and the impossible” to return his son: “He is an extraordinary being whom my whole family loves. We are convinced that, if it weren’t for him, my son would not have come out many years from now. He has juggled in such a turbulent country”.
