Iran hires criminals to do dirty work

In addition to arming terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah to wage war in the Middle East, Iran has long had a strategy of staging terrorist attacks in far-flung locations. These include the murderous 1994 attack on the Jewish center in Buenos Aires, as well as the 2012 bus bombing in Bulgaria that killed five Israeli tourists and one Bulgarian, and numerous foiled assassination attempts. And Jews aren’t the only targets: Iran has attempted to assassinate a Saudi ambassador to Washington, D.C., former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and numerous Iranian dissidents living abroad. To do so, it has hired criminals. Greg Miller, Souad MekhennetAnd Cate Bruin report:

In recent years, Iran has outsourced deadly operations and kidnappings to Hells Angels motorcycle gangs, a notorious Russian mafia network known as “Thieves in Law,” a heroin distribution syndicate led by an Iranian drug trafficker, and violent criminal groups from Scandinavia to South America. Using hitmen hired from within its criminal underworld, Iran has orchestrated plots against a former Iranian military officer living under a false identity in Maryland, an exiled Iranian-American journalist in Brooklyn, a women’s rights activist in Switzerland, LGBTQ+ activists in Germany and at least five journalists at Iran International, as well as dissidents and critics of the regime in a half-dozen other countries, according to interviews and documents. Iran’s turn to criminal proxies has been driven in part by necessity, officials said, reflecting the intense scrutiny that Iran’s own agents face from Western governments. In (one) plot, Iran used a German member of the (Hells Angels), Ramin Yektaparast, who had fled to Tehran to avoid murder charges, to orchestrate a bombing of a synagogue in Essen. An alleged collaborator refused to bomb the synagogue but shot into its windows.