In front of his coffin draped in black, a moment of contemplation took place on the tarmac of Le Bourget airport, where his body arrived around “a little over 3:00 a.m.” in the morning, said journalists from his news channel. continuously BFMTV.
Late Wednesday morning, his colleagues from BFMTV had observed a minute of silence in memory of the journalist killed on May 30 by a shrapnel.
A tribute will also be paid to him on Friday at 6:30 p.m. Place de la République in Paris, at the call of Reporters Without Borders (RSF) in particular. His family, friends and colleagues will be present.
The two people who teamed up with Frédéric Leclerc-Imhoff in Ukraine for BFMTV, reporter Maxime Brandstaetter and Ukrainian journalist-translator Oksana Leuta, for their part returned to France on June 3.
“His parents came to welcome us when we got off the plane, they were the first people I saw and it was not easy”, testified Sunday on BFMTV Mr. Brandstaetter, visibly very moved.
“I felt that I owed him that, to talk to his parents, to talk to them, to get closer to them, to feel close, to kiss his mother,” the reporter continued.
Oksana Leuta judged it “very important that the whole world hear what happened with Frédéric”.
Aged 32, Frédéric Leclerc-Imhoff had worked for BFMTV for six years and was carrying out his second mission there in Ukraine, as a journalist and image reporter (JRI).
“Frédéric was not a hothead. He weighed every minute of his mission,” said Marc-Olivier Fogiel, general manager of BFMTV, on the air, just after the announcement of his death.
Graduated in 2014, he had been trained in journalism at the Institute of Journalism Bordeaux Aquitaine (Ijba), after studying philosophy in Paris.
In a tribute on its site, the Ijba underlines “its kindness” and “its sense of listening”. Even if he was “discreet” by nature, he “defended with fervor and a lot of humor” his “commitments as a man and as a citizen”.
On May 30, after the announcement of the death of the journalist who was following a humanitarian mission in Ukraine, the French national anti-terrorist prosecutor’s office (Pnat) announced the opening of an investigation for war crimes.
Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna tweeted that the journalist had been “killed by a Russian bombardment”.
