In early February 2018, Maryam Mombeini received a phone call asking her to come to Evin prison, the most feared place in Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Two weeks before, her husband of 40 years, Kavous Seyed-Emami, professor at Imam Sadiq University, had been arrested. They were dual citizens of Iran and Canada. He had served as a managing director of the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation based in Tehran.
Her heart pounding, Ms. Mombeini rushed to the prison. She was met by a team of intelligence officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or “Sepah” as they are called in Iran. After interrogating Ms. Mombeini for several hours, Sepah officers allowed her to see her husband — that is, his dead body. It showed bruises and evidence of injections. According to the interrogators, Dr. Seyed-Emami had committed suicide.
He had been detained together with eight other members of his wildlife group, including its founder, dual U.S.-Iranian citizen and Columbia University graduate Morad Tahbaz. Another prominent member of the organization arrested at the same time was Niloufar Bayani, graduate of McGill and then Columbia University that awarded her master’s degree in conservation biology. Ms. Bayani worked for the United Nations Environmental Program from 2012-2017 before returning to Iran to join the Persian wildlife group.
Before the arrests, the focus of the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation had been preservation of the declining population of the Asiatic cheetahs, which are only present in Iran and are believed to be on the brink of extinction. The common practice in such studies is the use of hidden cameras in the habitat of the animals to record their movements. It was interpreted by the Revolutionary Guard as an attempt to spy on Iran’s military installations. The actual number of environmentalists detained across Iran is believed to be in hundreds.
In May 2018 a committee appointed by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani concluded that there was no evidence of any wrongdoing by the environmentalists. That call by senior government officials was ignored by the Sepah, which operates as an independent branch of the Iranian Armed Forces, directly under the supreme leader of Iran, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The trial of these conservationists by the Revolutionary Court began on January 30, 2019. Morad Tahbaz, Niloufar Bayani, and two other environmentalists have been accused of “sowing corruption on earth,” the most serious charge that carries a death sentence. Four others faced charges of espionage and of “collaborating with hostile states.”
Such charges against Iranian scientists, especially dual citizens, are common due their international connections. Ahmadreza Djalali, dual citizen of Iran and Sweden and former director of European projects on emergency response to terrorist attacks on hospitals, has been on death row in Evin prison since October 2017. In 2014, Sepah agents had approached him in Stockholm with a request to spy for Iran. He refused, and subsequently was detained while on a visit to Iran in 2016, and sentenced to death for allegedly helping the Mossad. Last December, over 130 Nobel Prize laureates wrote to the Iran’s supreme leader on Djalali’s behalf.
Environmentalists that went on trial this year have not been allowed to speak in their defense or to choose their own lawyers. During one of the hearings, Niloufar Bayani violated that rule by announcing that interrogators showed her the draft of her death sentence and threatened to pull out her fingernails if she would not sign a confession. The presiding judge Abolqasem Salavati (the one who sentenced Djalali), nicknamed “the hanging judge,” ordered removal of Bayani from the courtroom.
Relatives of the accused have not been allowed in the courtroom. Lawyers are afraid to speak about their clients, knowing that they can share their fate. The Sepah do not forgive and do not forget, as is shown by the example of Nasrin Sotoudeh who defended prominent Iranian prisoners, including the Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi. On March 12 of this year Ms. Sotoudeh, 55, was sentenced to 33 years in prison and 148 lashes.
Source » washingtonexaminer