Kameel Ahmady

Kameel Ahmady is a Kurdish academic with British-Iranian nationality who was arrested by Iranian authorities in August 2019 and released in November 2019 on a $40,000 bail. The reasons for Ahmady's arrest were not revealed by Iran.

Ahmady was born in Naghadeh and has been a British citizen since the 1990s.[1] He is an anthropologist who studied at the University of Kent and in 2015, undertook the first comprehensive study of Female Genital Mutilation in Iran. In 2009 he also published a travel guidebook for the Kurdish regions of Turkey.[1]

Ahmady was working as an anthropologist in Tehran when he was arrested in August 2019. According to the Kurdistan Human Rights Network, Ahmady's home and car were searched by security officials, and some of his belongings were confiscated. KHRN also reported that Ahmady had been working on two studies before he arrested, into LGBT communities and identity and ethnicity in Iran.[2]

Ahmady's family told Radio Farda that prosecutors refused to tell them what he was charged with after he had been taken to Evin prison.[3] Judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Esmaeli claimed that the arrest was due to a “connection with foreign countries and institutions ”.[1]

In September, Radio Farda reported that Ahmady's detention had been extended by another month.[4] Ahmady was released in November 2019 on bail of five billion rials, or about $40,000.[1]

Ahmady's arrest comes in the context of the imprisonment of other British-Iranian dual nationals on charges of espionage, including Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoush Ashoori.[5] Aras Amiri, an Iranian national with permanent residency in the UK, was sentenced to 10 years for spying in 2018.[6]