Researchers become prime targets in Middle East power plays

Authoritarian governments in the Middle East are increasingly willing to seize researchers and academics, who are seen as valuable bargaining chips in their joustings with Western nations, analysts warn.

"The risks now facing researchers in the Middle East are unprecedented," said Jean-Pierre Filiu, a historian at France’s Sciences Po university.

Filiu was speaking on Friday at a forum dedicated to two French colleagues, Fariba Adelkhah and Roland Marchal, who have been imprisoned in Iran since their arrest last June. They have been charged with conspiracy or collusion against national security, while Australian Kylie Moore-Gilbert of the University of Melbourne is serving a 10-year sentence on espionage charges.

Often authorities target their own citizens who have dual nationality, like Adelkhah, with Tehran in particular refusing to recognise a second passport.

In October, Iran confirmed the arrest of British-Iranian anthropologist Kamil Ahmadi before releasing him, and in December it freed Xiyue Wang, a Chinese-American researcher serving a 10-year term on spying charges.

Wang was released in exchange for Masoud Soleimani, an Iranian who had been held in the US for allegedly breaching sanctions -- and Tehran said it was open to other such exchanges.

But over the decades, the targeting of academics has often been more violent.

"It started with gunshots at the office of Malcolm Kerr, president of the American University of Beirut, who was murdered in 1984 by Hizbullah, already an arm of the Revolutionary Guards" of Iran, Filiu said.

Two years later, French sociologist Michel Seurat died in a Lebanese prison after his arrest because he was "denied medical care," he said.

"They were victims of the settling of scores by Iran with Washington and Paris." More recently, Italian doctorate student Giulio Regeni disappeared in Egypt while researching trade unions, one of the country’s last independent civil actors -- and increasingly in the crosshairs of the authorities.

His badly mutilated body was found more than a week later by the side of a road on the outskirts of the Egyptian capital, with an Italian post-mortem later indicating he had been tortured.