Iranian space monkey defects to Afghanistan

In what could be considered as a major embarrassment for Iran, a monkey it had allegedly sent to space just a few months back has defected to Afghanistan. The defection was discovered on Sunday evening, when Iranian space agency (Al Space) officials were not able to trace the simian after he disappeared from his quarters and had not been reporting for duty for the past few days.

Meanwhile NATO sources reported detaining a monkey which had crossed over from Afghanistan with ‘sensitive papers’. The unnamed monkey was detained early Sunday morning at a sensitive airbase in the country and was being interrogated.

The space monkey

The monkey was part of Iran’s first sub-orbital space mission and had become a national hero in the country. He was infact so popular that one point of time the then Iranian president Mohammad Ahmadinejad had stated “the monkey is not what you should be paying attention to. We instead want you to focus on the capability of our scientists”.

It is still not know why the monkey defected. Sources in Pakistan claimed that the monkey had problems with the new president Hassan Rouhani and his efforts to mend fences with the US. Others say that the monkey has been offered a senior role by the Taliban. “Since US drones have eliminated a large chunk of our senior management, we are seriously looking at Simians to fill up some significant vacancies that have arisen,” a Taliban HR official said.