The Diplomat
Spanish adventurer Santiago Sánchez Cogedor, who was released from prison last Sunday after spending 15 months in an Iranian jail, arrived in Madrid yesterday, where he said that Spaniards do not know “how lucky” they are for “having been born here” and praised the efforts of the Spanish ambassador in Tehran, Ángel Losada, to secure his release.
Losada “has been a real phenomenon, he has done a master’s degree in negotiation”, said the 41-year-old from Madrid, on his arrival at Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas Airport, where he was received by family and friends. “It is very difficult to negotiate with these people” and both the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the embassy in Iran “have juggled so that this departure can take place in such a convulsive country”, he explained. The ambassador and his family celebrated dinner and ate New Year’s Eve grapes with Santiago. “It was a unique, unforgettable experience”, the Spaniard declared.
His mother, Celia Cogedor, was also full of praise for Losada. “He has done the possible and the impossible, last night he was with him until he left him on the plane and until the plane took off he didn’t go home,” she told reporters as she waited for her son’s arrival from Dubai airport. “He behaved like a father,” he added. “He is an extraordinary being and we are convinced that, if it wasn’t for him, my son wouldn’t get out, but he wouldn’t get out for years, because the next appointment he had for the judge to see him was in January 25,” he said.
According to the Iranian Embassy in Spain, through the social network X, the release of Sánchez Cogedor was carried out “within the framework of the friendly and historical relations between the two countries and in compliance with the law”.
Santiago Sánchez Cogedor was arrested on his way through Iran while on foot to Qatar to attend the World Cup and after visiting the grave of Masha Amini, a young Kurdish woman who died in police custody after being arrested for improperly wearing the veil and whose death caused large protests in the country, with around 500 deaths, thousands of arrests and several executions. According to his mother, Sánchez Cogedor, her son was tricked by a “regime opponent” who received him in Iran and took him to Mahsa Amini’s grave to take a photo and spread it on social networks.
As a result, Santiago Sánchez Cogedor not only spent fifteen months in “one of the worst prisons in the world”, but also remained for all that time under the risk of “a possible death sentence, which nobody knows about”, because in Iran, espionage (the main charge against him) is punishable by death.
“I was stuck, very stressed” declared the young Spaniard, who, admitted, does not hold a grudge against anyone. “Those things are mine, because holding hatred and grudges is not good, it’s cowardly,” he said. “It’s been very hard, but I’m here, we don’t know how lucky we are to be born here,” he said.
Of his ordeal in Iran, Sánchez Cogedor remembers the 500 Iranian prisoners with whom he shared captivity in Evin prison, who held him in their arms and gave him a farewell letter as he was leaving. “You learned to be happy with little, and that little you shared with others,” says the letter, signed by the prison’s oldest inmate and read to the media by the Spanish adventurer. “You taught us that it is possible to enjoy the bad, and that in the end it is surely not so bad,” it continues. “You passed the test of patience and solitude with your inner strength, respect and education with your daily perseverance,” he concluded.
