Mohammad Jafar Montazeri, the Attorney General said, “the environmental infiltrators have been arrested.”

He claimed that “there is evidence of U.S and Israel infiltration in the case of arrested environmental activists.”

Montazeri continued: “In recent years U.S and Israel have used their agents to infiltrate the environmental field and get access to sensitive areas of the country. They put their cameras in those places to allegedly monitor a specific animal.”

Earlier this year, several environmental activists were arrested by the security forces. Kavous Seyed Emami, one of the arrested activists, was killed two weeks later in prison. Most of the arrested activists were charge with espionage, which later changed to “spreading corruption on earth”.