POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN

Kavous Emami

The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) has written to Iran’s leader protesting the death in prison of an Iranian-Canadian university professor who was accused of spying by Iranian authorities.  Kavous Seyed Emami, a dual-Canadian national, was arrested in January, and died in February in a Tehran prison, ostensibly by his own hand. He taught sociology and was also a prominent environmentalist who ran the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation.

CAUT’s letter, addressed to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and signed by CAUT executive director David Robinson, also protests the fact that Emani’s wife, Maryam Mombeini, a Canadian citizen, has been barred from leaving Iran to return to her children.

“I urge you to allow Ms. Mombeini to join her family in this moment of grief.  I fail to understand why Ms. Mombeini, a Canadian citizen, was barred from leaving Iran in the first place, and urge you to permit her the freedom to return to Canada,” Robinson wrote.

In February Maryam Mombeini was told to come to the offices of the Tehran prosecutor, where she could see her husband.  Instead, according to a report in the New York Times, she was interrogated for several hours and told that if she did not cooperate she too would end up in prison.  When the agents finally ran out of questions, she was informed she could see her husband.  There was just one thing, they said.  He was dead, having committed suicide in his cell.  Emani’s family does not believe he took his own life, and activists point to other suspicious deaths among detainees that have also been called suicides by Iranian authorities.