Iranian cheetah conservationists freed after serving long prison terms

Last four survivors released at Ramadan

            TEHRAN, Iran––All eight living Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation cheetah conservationists who were sent to Iranian prisons for alleged espionage in 2018 are reportedly now free.

The last four imprisoned Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation personnel were released as the governments of Iran,  Israel,  and the U.S. exchanged warnings about Iranian support of the Hamas,  Hezbollah,  and Houthi militias currently fighting Israel,  and about possible Iranian retaliation for an Israeli air strike on the Iranian embassy in Damascus,  Syria.

Faced death penalty

The eight,  plus 64-year-old Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation founder Kavous Seyed-Emami, were arrested on January 24-25,  2018,  charged with a variety of offenses centering on espionage that potentially carried the death penalty.

(See Iran to keep six cheetah conservationists in prison. Two more await fate.)

Seyed-Emami, an Iranian Canadian dual citizen,  was reported dead two months later.  The Iranian regime said he committed suicide while awaiting trial.

Sons escaped,  wife held 582 days more

Seyed-Emami’s two Canadian-born sons,  Mehran Seyed-Emami and Ramin Seyed-Emami,  were allowed to leave Iran and return to Canada in March 2018,  but his wife,  Maryam Mombeini,  was turned back at the airport.

Maryam Mombeini escaped Iran through Turkey and returned to Canada with the help of the Canadian embassy in November 2019,  582 days after the Seyed-Emami sons,  just ahead of the trials of the seven surviving defendants.

The trials appeared to be timed as a warning to Iranians who had recently staged a week of protests against fuel price hikes of as much as 300%.

Six-to-eight-year sentences

Held incommunicado until their trials,  allowed only court-appointed lawyers,  seven of the eight Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation defendants received six-to-eight-year prison sentences.

Niloufar Bayani,  the best-known academic scholar among them,  was sentenced to serve ten years.

“Bayani wrote letters to government officials and members of the judiciary from Tehran’s Evin prison,  revealing how incarcerated people were being subjected to isolation,  exhausting interrogations,  torture and threats of rape,”  reported Michele Catanzaro for Nature.com.

Another Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation employee,  Pouria Sepahvand,  was reportedly detained on February 2,  2019 for an unknown reason,  and was said to have been held at an unknown location.  She was not identified as ever having been charged or tried for any offense,  but has not resurfaced in media reports.

Free at last!

Three of the eight Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation personnel who were tried,  convicted,  and sentenced,  Amir Hossein Khaleghi, Sam Rajabi,  and Abdolreza Kouhpayeh,  were released in September 2023 after serving their six-year minimum sentences,  Middle East Eye recounted.

“Morad Tahbaz,   a businessman and conservationist with US-British–Iranian citizenship,  was released last September [2023] as part of a US–Iranian prisoner swap,”  wrote Michele Catanzaro for Nature.com.

Two of the remaining four,  Niloufar Bayani and Houman Jowkar,  were released on April 8,  2024,  according to the Tehran newspaper Etemad.

The last two,  Sepideh Kashani and Taher Ghadirian,  were released the following day,  April 9,  2024,  according to “several Iranian media outlets, including the semiofficial ILNA news agency,”  said Associated Press.

Released at Ramadan

“The four were among more than 2,000 prisoners granted amnesty on the occasion of Eid al-Fitr,  which celebrates the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan,”  Associated Press explained.

On April 9,  said Middle East Eye, “photos of Jokar and Bayani outside the infamous Evin prison were published on Farsi social media.  Two days later,  local media published a photo of the four freed activists posing with the three other environmentalists who had already been released after serving their sentences.

“The Sazandegi daily reported the pardon under the headline:  ‘The late freedom.’  While the Ham Mihan daily covered the incident with the headline:  ‘Pardon after imprisonment.’

“Both outlets reported that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps arrested the activists despite clear evidence of their innocence,”  Middle East Eye said.

Taught course on climate change in prison

Bayani,  while imprisoned,  “interviewed 25 female political prisoners incarcerated for opposing Iranian government policies,”  wrote Michele Catanzaro for Nature.com,  to research “how climate change is perceived in an oil and gas producing state.”

The interviews formed the basis for a paper entitled “Climate Literacy in the Land of Oil,”  Catanzaro said.

After that,  Catanzaro continued,  “Bayani began teaching a course on climate change,  which led to an open letter from the prisoners calling on their government to take stronger action on climate change.”

Asiatic cheetahs rediscovered in 2005

Asiatic cheetahs were believed to have been extirpated from Iran until in June 2005 a camera trap deployed by the New York City-based Wildlife Conservation Society,  placed in partnership with the Iranian Department of Environment,  photographed an adult female and four cubs in an isolated part of the Dar-e Anjir Wildlife Refuge.

Formed in 2008,  the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation took over management of the Iranian cheetah research project,  identifying 82 individual cheetahs in 14 different protected habitats between December 2011 and November 2013.

News coverage of the sightings,  however,  embarrassed the Iranian regime.  The major threats to the Iranian cheetah turned out to be government-sponsored development projects.

Missile silos built in cheetah habitat

According to the opposition news web site Kalame,  in a an April 16,  2018 report translated by the Center for Human Rights in Iran,  “Although these regions were registered with the United Nations as protected areas,  the Revolutionary Guard thought it could build military sites there without any problem.  Thus it went ahead with installing missile silos and equipment.  The move met opposition from environmental groups,”  who “made clear that the Revolutionary Guard was endangering their activities to collect information and take photos of animals and plants for the United Nations.”

The Revolutionary Guard,  Kalame said,  “asked these groups to instead submit old photos in their annual reports to the United Nations.  The conflict went on for years and eventually, the Revolutionary Guard used [alleged] espionage as an excuse to arrest the environmentalists so that it could continue its activities in the protected regions.”

Funder had politically problematic links

An apparent aggravating factor,  reported National Geographic writer Kayleigh E. Long,  was that the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation “occasionally worked with the New York-based Panthera, one of the most prominent big cat conservation organizations in the world.  On several instances, Panthera provided technical assistance and sent experts to Iran as part of the Conservation of Asiatic Cheetah and Its Habitat Project (CACP), funded by the United Nations and Iran’s Department of the Environment.

“But in October 2017,”  Long continued,  “the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation severed ties with Panthera over anti-Iran comments made by its billionaire funder Thomas Kaplan. Kaplan helps fund the lobby group United Against Nuclear Iran,  which argues for sanctions and regime change.”

United Against Nuclear Iran,  Long said,  “counts among its members a number of senior intelligence and defense figures,  including the former heads of Mossad [the Israeli national intelligence bureau] and the CIA—agencies the researchers would ultimately be accused of working for.”

Panthera sought to distance itself from Kaplan,  but apparently not in terms persuasive to the Iranian regime.

Please donate to help support our work: 

www.animals24-7.org/donate/