From the article it seems that there is a group of passionate eco-activists which suddenly became a target of Iranian anti-espionage agency; this sounds like a waste of time. I know that authoritarian regimes behave in a non-logical way, but here it looks like really stupid move. Are those people members of opposition or something like this?
I can't say how accurate that is, but that's the explanation you see a lot even from folks inside Iran, but generally government policy in Iran doesn't seem as unified as others and there are a lot of folks with their hands on the strings of government. You'll see someone released and it seems like a move towards less persecution, and in the same turn someone else picked up inexplicably for what seems like nothing at all. The idea being that different people are pulling the strings.
Of course this just could be a simple coincidence, but also a possible and reasonable suspicion for further investigation.
A letter seen by National Geographic sheds new light on how PWHF staff became concerned with their cheetah conservation work getting derailed by politics in the months before the arrests.
The letter, dated October 17, 2017, was addressed to then chief conservation officer Luke Hunter at the big cat conservation organization Panthera, which occasionally provided technical assistance and sent experts to Iran to work with PWHF as part of the Conservation of Asiatic Cheetah and Its Habitat Project (CACP), funded by the UN and Iran’s Department of the Environment.
It voiced “alarm and consternation” regarding comments critical of Iran made by Panthera chair and co-founder Thomas Kaplan, a billionaire investor, businessman, and philanthropist. The previous month, Kaplan had spoken at the summit for United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), the lobby group he helps fund and which counts among its board former members of U.S. and Israeli intelligence services. Although Kaplan was not speaking in his capacity as Panthera chair, the letter suggests the Iranian researchers were worried that being associated with an organization linked to someone publicly criticizing Iran could be problematic for them.
UANI advocates “the economic and diplomatic isolation of the Iranian regime in order to compel Iran to abandon its illegal nuclear weapons program, support for terrorism, and human rights violations,” according to its website. This summit was the first public show of Kaplan’s support for UANI.
It looks like the PWHF people themselves realised the risk of such an association early on.
Usually it is the individuals at the top who give/sell access to their friends for trophy hunt expeditions. Having a chance of cameras filming it would jeopardize that and would expose the corruption.