On the tarmac at Le Bourget airport, there were his family and loved ones, of course, and also the Minister of Culture Rima Abdul Malak.
The remains of journalist Frédéric Leclerc-Imhoff, killed on May 30 by shrapnel in Ukraine, arrived in France overnight from Wednesday to Thursday.
A moment of contemplation took place before his coffin draped in black.
Late Wednesday morning, his colleagues from BFMTV had observed a minute of silence in his memory, and a tribute will 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.
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 greet us when we got off the plane, they were the first people I saw and it was not easy”, Mr. Brandstaetter testified on BFMTV on Sunday, 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," continued the reporter.
Oksana Leuta considered it "very important that the whole world hear what happened with Frédéric".
“Not a hothead,” reacted Marc-Olivier Fogiel
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 humour" 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".