Escaped lioness kills keeper in Iran, prowls zoo for hours

By The Associated Press
January 30, 2022 | 1:09 PM

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — A lioness killed her keeper in Iran on Sunday as he was feeding her lunch, then escaped with her male partner and prowled around a zoo before being captured, media reported.

The official IRNA news agency said the 40-year-old victim, identified only by his family name, Esfandani, was putting meat through a feeding window when the two lions managed to open their cage.

Police and guards captured the couple a few hours later at the zoo in the central city of Arak, some some 200 kilometers (144 miles) southwest of the capital, Tehran.

Authorities are investigating the case. Such incidents are rare in Iran, and often blamed on poor safety measures and inadequate emergency service.

Analysis: The world Washington built is fraying. What comes next?

By J.J. Green
August 20, 2026 | 8:57 PM

The United States is confronting a global security environment that increasingly resembles the outcome its Cold War adversaries once hoped to produce: a divided West, weakened alliances, economic exhaustion, multiple simultaneous wars and declining confidence in American leadership. That does not mean today’s crises were orchestrated according to some surviving Soviet master plan. The Soviet Union is gone, and the threats facing Washington now come from several different states with different interests. But the strategic effect is strikingly familiar. Early NATO assessments of Soviet intentions warned that Moscow sought to weaken the democratic powers, deny the West a secure European base and ultimately exhaust North America economically. Now, NATO says Russia is again trying to reconfigure the Euro-Atlantic security order through military force, sabotage, cyberattacks, coercion and disinformation. The difference is that much of the pressure now confronting the West is occurring simultaneously — and some of the damage to alliance cohesion is self-inflicted.

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