Asiatic cheetahs are haunting mandarins of the ministry of environment and forests. The spotted big cats, which were found in India during the medieval period and are now extinct, are all set to be cloned. Scientists from Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology are awaiting clearance from the ministry of external affairs to visit Iran to finalise modalities of fetching a pair of Asiatic cheetahs. If the pair cannot be acquired for any reason, the CCMB plans to collect fertilised eggs from a female there to develop in incubators here before planting them into surrogate leopard mothers, and then cloning, said Lalji Singh, the director of CCMB, over telephone.