“I’m screaming your first name”: the chilling testimony of Frédéric Leclerc-Imhoff’s colleague just after the explosion

While covering the war in Ukraine for the BFMTV channel, the french journalist Frederic Leclerc-Imhoff32, was fatally hit by shrapnel near Severodonetsk, in the east of the country, on Monday 30 May. A tragic disappearance revealed on encrypted Telegram messaging where journalists discovered photographs of a bombed humanitarian convoy near which a bloodied body lay. A bracelet worn by the young man allowed the identification of the body repatriated this week, on the night of Wednesday to Thursday around three o’clock in the morning at Le Bourget airport where members of his family were waiting for him.

On Monday, June 3, Frédéric Leclerc-Imhoff’s two colleagues also returned from Ukraine: reporter Maxime Brandstaetter and Ukrainian journalist-translator Oksana Leuta. Both then observed the minute of silence in memory of the thirty-something journalist this Wednesday at the end of the week. A difficult but necessary step before the chilling testimony that Maxime Brandstaetter delivered yesterday during a rally in memory of Frédéric Leclerc-Imhoff Place de la Republique in Paris: Right after the explosion, after I get out of that horrible truck, I find myself standing in the middle of the street, facing the cabin where you are, Fred, and I shout your name over and over. […] I was waiting for you to get out of this cabin, to look at me with your gentle and reassuring air to tell me in an equally gentle voice: ‘I’m coming Maxime’. It didn’t happen. »

This moving portrait of Frédéric Leclerc-Imhoff

Before delivering this chilling testimony on the minutes that followed the explosion, Maxime Brandstaetter painted a tender and friendly portrait of Frédéric Leclerc-Imhoff: “ Before Ukraine, I don’t know Fred. We met between colleagues from BFMTV, but no more. When I find out that I’m going with him, everyone says to me: ‘How lucky! You’ll see, he’s awesome. You will love yourself very much. They will spend 34 days together, the time of two missions in Ukraine. ” We work together, we eat together, we live together, we struggle together. So much so that today I feel like I know Fred […] He is incredible. […] listening, gentle with people, considerate and always late. Not out of laziness, but out of perfectionism. ” He always stays as long as he wants to film and until he’s satisfied, we don’t leave. » A moving, tragic and moving testimony about a man who “wanted to use his lens to show us the reality in all impartiality” according to his mother, Sylviane Imhoff.