Iran Uses Hells Angels, Other Criminal Gangs to Target Critics – Later On

In retrospect, it’s not surprising that a criminal government would form an alliance with criminal gangs. I bet we’ll see other governments, particularly China and Russia, adopt the same idea. Indeed, Russia has formed alliances with right-wing individuals (influencers and podcasters) and groups (the Republican Party), and India is behind a number of assassinations and attempted assassinations in Canada.

Greg Miller, Souad Mekhennet and Cate Brown report in the Washington Post (no paywall):

In the months before his attackers tracked him down, the exiled Iranian journalist was shuttled in and out of safe houses by London’s Metropolitan Police, given a secret way to alert rescue services and had surveillance equipment installed in his home.

British authorities have done even more to protect Iran International, the London-based satellite news channel that broadcasts journalist Pouria Zeraati’s weekly program and has built an audience of millions in Iran despite being banned by the Islamic Republic.

Police sent a team of undercover agents to protect the station’s employees. Police also arrested a suspect who was guarding the station’s entrances. Police also placed armored vehicles outside the station’s headquarters and convinced the station to temporarily relocate to Washington for seven months last year.

None of these measures succeeded in protecting Zeraati from the plot Iran has been accused of this year. On March 29, he was stabbed four times and left bleeding on the pavement outside his home in the London suburb of Wimbledon by assailants who were not from Iran and had no discernible connection to the security services, British investigators said.

Instead, officials said, Iran hired criminals in Eastern Europe who faced few obstacles as they cleared security at Heathrow Airport, spent days tracking Zeraati and then hit departing flights just hours after carrying out an ambush that their victim survived — possibly deliberately, investigators said, to serve as a warning but not to cause the consequences that would flow from killing a British citizen.

Iran’s alleged reliance on criminals rather than intelligence agents underscores an alarming evolution in the tactics of a country considered by U.S. and Western security officials to be among the world’s most determined and dangerous practitioners of “transnational repression,” a term for the use of violence and intimidation by governments on the sovereign territory of others to silence dissidents, journalists and others deemed disloyal.

The long arm of repression

Iran is using criminal gangs to target exiled dissidents, journalists and human rights activists in the United States, Europe and the Middle East. The Washington Post examines a global surge in cross-border crackdowns. Previous stories in the series examined Indian assassination plots in North America and China’s efforts to silence dissidents in an American city.

The United States and other Western governments are struggling to stem this phenomenon. As a result, refuge for those fleeing persecution is shrinking on almost every continent.

Senior security officials said governments’ use of criminal proxies has compounded the difficulty of protecting those who have sought refuge in the United States, Europe and elsewhere. Security services that previously focused on tracking agents of Russia’s GRU spy agency or Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) are now confronting plots that are being handed off — often through encrypted channels — to criminal networks with deep roots in Western society.

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.

This story reveals new details about how Iran has cultivated and exploited connections with criminal networks behind a recent wave of violent plots secretly orchestrated by elite units in the IRGC and Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence (MOIS). It is based on . . .

Read more. (no paywall)

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