TEHRAN: Leading academics in Iran wrote to President Hassan Rouhani on Monday, demanding answers over the alleged “suicide” of a revered environmentalist in prison.
The family of Kavous Seyed Emami, 63, a renowned professor at Imam Sadegh University and founder of the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation, was told on Friday that he had killed himself in prison two weeks after his arrest.
A judiciary official claimed on Sunday that he had confessed to crimes related to an espionage investigation, and seven other members of his wildlife NGO are still behind bars.
“The news of the death of Dr. Kavous Seyed Emami has astounded and shocked the scientific community and the environmental activists of the country,” wrote a group of four academic societies in an open letter to the president.
“In addition to being a well-known professor, a distinguished scientist and war veteran... he was a noble and ethical human being,” the letter said.
“The news and rumors related to his arrest and death are not believable.”
The letter was published by four leading academic associations related to political science, sociology, peace studies and cultural studies, which include professors from Iran’s top universities.
Addressing Rouhani, they wrote: “Our minimum expectation is that you take immediate and effective action to seriously investigate the case... and make the institutions involved in this painful loss accountable.”
One of Rouhani’s closest advisers, Hesameddin Ashena, tweeted later that the judiciary, which is dominated by conservatives and has clashed with his moderate government in the past, should be more closely supervised.
“Judges, prosecutors, officers, interrogators are neither infallible, nor faultless or free from prejudice,” Ashena wrote.
“Just as it is necessary to supervise the executive branch, it is necessary to supervise their dealings with defendants.
“One Mortazavi was enough for the country, let’s not have another one,” he added, referring to notorious former Tehran prosecutor Said Mortazavi, who was convicted over the death of a protester in custody during mass demonstrations in 2009.
Asked about Emami’s case on Monday, judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejeie told the reformist ILNA news agency: “I have heard he committed suicide but I have so far no information on the details. This recent incident is under investigation.”
Separately, the Environment Protection Organization denied rumors that its deputy head Kaveh Madani had been arrested.
A reformist lawmaker, Mahmoud Sadeghi, had stated via Twitter on Sunday that the EPO had told him Madani was arrested over the weekend.
A senior official at the EPO, who did not wish to be named, told AFP on Monday that this was incorrect and that Madani was at work.
A tweet was published on Madani’s personal Twitter account early Monday for the first time in three days.
“Hopeful for narrow-mindedness to get wiped out. Hopeful for peace of mind for environmental activists. Hopeful for the removal of concern of those awaiting the return of loved ones,” it read.
Iran academics demand answers over environmentalist death
Iran academics demand answers over environmentalist death
Women main victims of Sudan conflict abuses: minister to AFP
- Khalifa said sexual violence has been reported on both sides, but she insisted it is “systematic” among the RSF
- Her ministry has documented more than 1,800 rapes between April 2023 and October 2025
PORT SUDAN: Women are the main victims of abuse in Sudan’s war, facing “the world’s worst” sexual violence and other crimes committed with impunity, a rights activist turned social affairs minister for the army-backed government told AFP.
The Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have been locked in a brutal conflict since April 2023 that has killed tens of thousands of people, displaced around 11 million and been marked by widespread sexual violence.
Sulaima Ishaq Al-Khalifa said abuses against women routinely accompanied looting and attacks, with reports of rape often perpetrated as “the family witnessed” the crime.
“There is no age limit. A woman of 85 could be raped, a child of one year could be raped,” the trained psychologist told AFP at her home in Port Sudan.
The longtime women’s rights activist, recently appointed to the government, said that women were also being subjected to sexual slavery and trafficked to neighboring countries, alongside forced marriages arranged to avoid shame.
Khalifa said sexual violence has been reported on both sides, but she insisted it is “systematic” among the RSF, who she says use it “as a weapon of war” and for the purposes of “ethnic cleansing.”
Her ministry has documented more than 1,800 rapes between April 2023 and October 2025 — a figure that does not include atrocities documented in western Darfur and the neighboring Kordofan region from late October onwards.
“It’s about... humiliating people, forcing them to leave their houses and places and cities. And also breaking... the social fabrics,” Khalifa said.
“When you are using sexual violence as a weapon of war, that means you want to extend... the war forever,” because it feeds a “sense of revenge,” she added.
- ‘War crimes’ -
A report by the SIHA Network, an activist group that documents abuses against women in the Horn of Africa, found that more than three-quarters of recorded cases involved rape, with 87 percent attributed to the RSF.
The United Nations has repeatedly raised alarm over what it describes as targeted attacks on non?Arab communities in Darfur, while the International Criminal Court (ICC) has opened a formal investigation into “war crimes” by both sides.
Briefing the UN Security Council in mid-January, ICC deputy prosecutor Nazhat Shameem Khan said investigators had uncovered evidence of an “organized, calculated campaign” in El-Fasher — the army’s last stronghold in Darfur captured by the RSF in late October.
The campaign, Khan added, involved mass rapes and executions “on a massive scale,” sometimes “filmed and celebrated” by the perpetrators and “fueled by a sense of complete impunity.”
Darfur endured a brutal wave of atrocities in the early 2000s, and a former Janjaweed commander — from the militia structure that later evolved into the RSF — was recently found guilty by the International Criminal Court of multiple war crimes, including rape.
“What’s happening now is much more ugly. Because the mass rape thing is happening and documented,” said Khalifa.
RSF fighters carrying out the assaults “have been very proud about doing this and they don’t see it as a crime,” she added.
“You feel that they have a green light to do whatever they want.”
In Darfur, several survivors said RSF fighters “have been accusing them of being lesser people, like calling them ‘slaves’, and saying that when I’m attacking you, assaulting you sexually, I’m actually ‘honoring’ you, because I am more educated than you, or (of) more pure blood than you.”
- ‘Torture operation’ -
Women in Khartoum and Darfur, including El-Fasher, have described rapes carried out by a range of foreign nationals.
These were “mercenaries from West Africa, speaking French, including from Mali, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Chad, as well as Colombia and Libya” — allegedly fighting alongside the RSF, Khalifa added.
Some victims were abducted and held as sexual slaves, while others were sold through trafficking networks operating across Sudan’s porous borders, said Khalifa.
Many of these cases remain difficult to document because of the collapse of state institutions.
In conservative communities, social stigma also remains a major obstacle to documenting the scale of the abuse.
Families often force victims into marriage to “cover up what happened,” particularly when pregnancies result from rape, according to the minister.
“We call it a torture operation,” she said, describing “frightening” cases in which children and adolescent girls under 18 are forced into marriage.
