Iran turns to criminal gangs to attack its critics

Despite the high protection of the British police, Pouria Zeraati was stabbed by attackers who managed to evade the security installed around him

By Greg Miller

In the months before his attackers tracked him down, the exiled Iranian journalist had been moved in and out of safe houses by the London Metropolitan Police, he was given a secret way to signal rescue units and had monitoring devices installed in his home.

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

Police assigned a team of undercover officers to protect the station’s employees, arrested a suspect recorded guarding the station’s entrances, placed armored cars outside its headquarters and, over a seven-month period last year, convinced the network to temporarily move to Washington.

None of these measures managed to protect Zeraati of the plot suspected to have been launched by Iran this year. On March 29, he was stabbed four times and left to bleed to death on the pavement outside his home in the London suburb of Wimbledon by attackers who were not from Iran and had no discernible connection to its security services, according to British investigators.

Instead, officials said, Iran hired criminals in Eastern Europe who encountered few obstacles when passing through security checks at the Heathrow Airport, spent days tracking down Zeraati and then took outbound flights just hours after carrying out an ambush that their victim survived, perhaps intentionally, investigators said, to serve as a warning but without causing the repercussions that would come with the murder of a British citizen.

Iran’s alleged reliance on criminals rather than covert operatives underscored an alarming evolution in tactics by a nation that security officials United States y West They are considered one of the most determined and dangerous practitioners of “transnational repression,” a term for the use of violence and intimidation by governments in foreign sovereign territories to silence dissidents, journalists and others deemed disloyal.

Senior security officials said the use of criminals by governments has further complicated the protection of those who have sought refuge in the United States, Europe and other places. Security services that once focused on tracking down spy agency operatives Russian GRU or of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) de Iran They now face plots delivered, often through encrypted channels, to criminal networks deeply embedded in Western society.

In recent years, Iran has outsourced deadly operations and kidnappings to motorcycle gangs Hells Angels, to a notorious Russian mafia network known as “Thieves in Law”, a heroin distribution syndicate run by an Iranian drug trafficker and violent criminal groups from Scandinavia  but also 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 Ministry of Intelligence of Iran (MOIS). It is based on interviews with senior officials in more than a dozen countries, hundreds of pages of criminal court records in the United States y Europe, as well as additional research documents obtained by The Washington Post security services.

Using hitmen it has hired in the criminal underworld, Iran has commissioned plots against a former Iranian military officer living under a false identity in Maryland, an Iranian-American journalist exiled in Brooklyn, a women’s rights activist in Switzerland, activists LGBTQ + en Germany and at least five journalists from Iran International, as well as dissidents and critics of the regime in a half-dozen other countries, according to interviews and records.

Other countries have begun to adopt this strategy. Indian security services hired criminal groups to kill a Sikh activist in Canada last year and target another in New Yorkk, according to officials of United States y Canada.

Russia, which has traditionally relied on its own agents for lethal operations, last year turned to elements of the mafia in Spain to kill a military helicopter pilot who had defected to Ukraine and then resettled in the Mediterranean.

Iran’s turn toward criminal allies has been driven in part by necessity, officials said, reflecting the intense scrutiny Iran’s operatives face from Western governments. The attack on Zeraati avoided these Iran-focused defenses.

“We are not dealing with the usual suspects,” he said. Matt Jukes, the head of counter-terrorism policing in the UK and assistant commissioner for special operations with Scotland YardHe acknowledged that Zeraati’s attackers remain at large more than five months after her stabbing.

They have been identified and their travels traced to countries of Eastern Europe, but so far they have not been arrested. Officials said the suspects remain in Eastern Europe and that other security services are cooperating with British authorities, but they declined to explain why the suspects have not been arrested.

“What we have is a hostile state actor that sees the borderless battlefield and individuals in London as legitimate targets just as much as if they were in Iran,” Jukes said. Along with the US domestic spy agency, Great Britain, MI5, Metropolitan Police has tracked more than 16 Islamic Republic plots in the past two years, according to British intelligence and security officials, many of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive and ongoing investigations.

United States has faced a wave of similar threats, including several that have been detailed in criminal indictments connecting motorcycle gangs in Canada and elements of the mafia in Eastern Europe with planned assassinations commissioned by Iran.

Matthew G. Olsen, who heads the national security division at the Justice Department, said that “Iran is clearly at the top of the list” of states that year after year seek to kill or kidnap dissidents and journalists outside their borders. Other countries, particularly China, seek to intimidate or repress diaspora populations, Olsen said, but Iran is consistently “focused on actions at the most extreme end of (transnational repression) because of its lethal approach.”

Iran dismissed the accusations as Western disinformation.The Islamic Republic Iran harbors neither the intention nor the plan to engage in assassination or kidnapping operations, whether in the West or in any other country,” the mission said. Iran before the United Nations in a statement.

“These fabrications are inventions of the Zionist regime, the terrorist sect Mujahideen-e Khalq based in Albania, and certain Western intelligence services, including those of United States, to divert attention from the atrocities committed by the Israeli regime.”

An increase in attacks

The foreign operations of Iran have intensified in response to a period of political unrest fueled by mass protests over economic conditions and the regime’s treatment of women. Security services in Tehran They are targeting those outside the country whom they accuse of stoking these internal divisions, they said. officials y Western analysts.

Amid concerns that the conflict in Gaza could break out into a regional war, Tehran He has also been linked to plots against american officials y Israelis and members of Jewish communities in France y Germany.

El Justice Department filed charges last month against a Pakistani man with ties to Iran who was accused of seeking to hire a hitman to assassinate political figures in United States, possibly including the former president Donald Trump.

It was the latest in a series of plots against members of his administration, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former national security adviser John Bolton, in response to a US drone attack in Iraq who killed the leader of the IRGC Qasem Soleimani. Officials and security experts said the pace of operations emanating from Iran It is unprecedented.

The data published by the Washington Institute In August they listed 88 plots of murder, kidnapping and other violent acts linked to Iran in the past five years, surpassing the total for the preceding four decades after the 1979 revolution. At least 14 of those recent cases involved criminal organizations. “We are seeing a Major escalation in lethal planning from a government that has used this tactic from the beginning,” he said Matthew Levitt, a counterterrorism expert in the Washington Institute.

The results have been mixed. For every plot that has succeeded, others have failed, often due to mistakes made by those hired. Iran appears to accept the drawbacks of the outsourcing model because of the offsetting advantages. These include making it difficult to attribute attacks to Tehran, the abundance of criminals willing to commit acts of violence for relatively modest sums of money and a negligible cost of failure. Rather than putting the police officers themselves at risk, Iran, said an intelligence analyst U.S.“Two guys who barely know each other will spend 20 years in prison.”

Zeraati, 36, had faced threats since he began his program in 2022 in Iran International, a satellite and online news platform funded by Saudi Arabia that eludes the censors of Iran and broadcasts news and commentary to millions of viewers. In November 2022, the wife of Zeraati, a real estate agent, was approached by two men on a motorcycle outside a health club in London.

“We know where you live”, said one, according to Zeraati. “We’re going to kill your husband“. Zeraati He was one of five Iranian journalists whose photos appeared on “Wanted, Dead or Alive” posters hanging from signposts in Iran and widely circulated on government-linked social media.

However, the stabbing took place at a time when the level of threat against Iran International had decreased. The channel had returned from its relocation in Washington to new studies in London surrounded by blast-proof walls, guard posts and surveillance cameras.

After multiple stays in safe houses, Zeraati had returned to his residence, an apartment in a four-story building so close to the famous tennis complex Wimbledon that you can hear the sound of balls being hit on the practice courts. The attackers seem to have taken advantage security vulnerabilities. His home address could be found in online property records.

Its broadcast schedule – a weekly program that airs on Friday at night – pointed to a predictable travel pattern. When Zeraati He crossed the street to his car around 15:00 p.m. to go to work, He saw a disheveled man approaching.

“Brother, can you give me three pounds in change?” the man said, he recalled. Zeraati in an interview. While Zeraati As he continued toward his car, a second man emerged from a leaf-covered driveway. The second man grabbed the man’s arms. Zeraati while the first, smiling widely, repeatedly stabbing him in the leg with a knife.

The decision to stab his thigh instead of his heart or other vital organs led police to believe that The attack was meant to be a warningThe attackers then ran up the street to meet a accomplice in a car.

The first idea of Zeraati was that he had been mugged. But when he reached for his phone to call an ambulance, he realised that the attackers had not taken any of his belongings, including a wallet, a watch and a Montblanc pen.

“At that moment I realized“, He said Zeraati. “It had to do with my work.”. If he stabbing was meant to silence Zeraati and sow fear among critics of the regime in West, was only partially successful. Zeraati returned to the airwaves after a brief stay in the hospital. “I wanted to send a message that the flow of information in the 21st century cannot be stopped.“He said.

Others journalists, dissidents and critics of the regime acknowledge that they remain deeply affected. “A shiver ran down my spine,” he said. Alireza Nader, an independent analyst of Iran based Washington.

“Everyone who is active against the regime, who speaks publicly against the regime, felt that attack.”. The British officials They have not publicly accused Iran responsibility. Security officials said they see no other explanation but are still gathering evidence.

The functionaries Iranian have said the country was not involved in the stabbing. “We deny any link to this story of this so-called journalist,” the ambassador of the country in the United Kingdom in a post on X the day after the attack.

Recruiting the Hells Angels

Iran has subcontracted murders and kidnappings to at least five criminal syndicates, the officials said. officialsAt the center of this network is an alleged heroin trafficking kingpin based in Iran, Naji Sharifi Zindashti.

Criminal charges of U.S. made public earlier this year describe an alleged scheme in which Zindashti negotiated a $350.000 contract with two members of the Hells Angels en Canada to kill an Iranian defector and his wife who were living under false identities in Maryland.

In exchanges through encrypted texts, the would-be killers discussed their client’s insistence that the killing be symbolically brutal. One assured the other that he would “make sure to hit this guy in the head with AT LEAST half the magazine,” according to the U.S. indictment, adding, “we have to wipe his head off his torso.”

The name of the targeted defector has not been released, but officials U.S. They said the individual had served as an officer in the IRGC, a powerful wing of the army of Iran created after the 1979 revolution, and had become an informant for the CIA.

The incongruous partnership between an Islamic theocracy and a notorious motorcycle gang was driven in part by necessity, the officials said. officials, given the resources that US security agencies devote to preventing Iran from deploying operations in the United States.

However, the Hells Angels have chapters all over the country. and strong control over drug trafficking in the provinces Canadians, officials said. And there were previous connections between Iran and the Hells Angels. In another plot, Iran used a German member of the gang, Ramin Yektaparast, who had fled to Tehran to escape murder charges, to orchestrate the bombing of a synagogue in Essen. A suspected associate refused to bomb the synagogue, but fired at its windows.

The point of contact in the plot of Maryland was a full member called Damion Ryan, who has a string of convictions in Canada for crimes including drug trafficking, assault, robbery and home invasion, according to court records. Those documents list aliases for him, including “Berserker” and “Mr. Wolf.”

Ryan, 43 years old, in turn recruited a young man affiliated with the Hells Angels, Adam R. Pearson, 29 years old, who was hiding in Minneapolis to escape arrest on murder charges in CanadaAccording officials from the US and Canada, and court records.

An attorney representing Ryan declined to comment.. The lawyers who have represented Pearson did not previously respond to requests for comment.

By March 2021, the pair of Hells Angels had agreed on the six-figure price and Zindashti He had sent photos and maps, as well as an initial payment of $20.000 to cover travel expenses, according to the indictment. U.S. It is unclear how Iran identified the defector’s location.

Then, just as it entered its final stages, the plot stalled. The indictment provides no explanation as to why Pearson never made the trip to Maryland, but that same month, the security services in Europe They achieved a breakthrough that impacted criminal networks around the world.

Zindashti and the two members of the Hells Angels They had been communicating via an encrypted messaging service known as Sky ECC. Launched by a Vancouver-based company in 2008, the system became a mainstay among criminal syndicates by turning ordinary mobile phones into seemingly impenetrable devices, disabling their cameras, microphones and GPS trackers while adding a “self-destruct switch” to delete incriminating data.

However, at the beginning of 2021, the Belgian security services and dutch found a way to breach network security. On March 9, Belgian police carried out hundreds of raids, arrested dozens of suspected traffickers and seized 17 tons of cocaine. Among those arrested in Belgium and the Netherlands were members of the Hells Angels.

U.S. officials said the Maryland plot came to their attention as investigators were examining the treasure trove Sky E.C.C.. Pearson He was arrested by the FBI en Minnesota and extradited to Canada. In February 2022, Ryan He was arrested after a raid on his home in Ottawa, where authorities found a cache of weapons, bulletproof vests and approximately $95.000 in cash.

A drug lord in Tehran

Zindashti has emerged as a central cog in the operations of Iran. A corpulent figure standing over 1,83 feet (6 meters) tall and weighing 113 pounds (250 kilograms), Zindashti He was described by a US intelligence analyst as a “Pablo Escobar-type drug trafficker.”

Now in its early 50s, Zindashti acquired that status after emerging triumphant from a bloody regional drug war triggered by one of the largest seizures in the history of Europe. It involved a cargo ship called Noor One which arrived in a Greek port in June 2014 carrying more than two tons of heroin.

Some accused Zindashti to alert the authorities in order to undermine their rivals. He has survived several assassination attempts, But his daughter and a nephew were killed in 2014 by gunmen who approached the Porsche Cayenne in which they were traveling in Istanbul, mistakenly believing that Zindashti was in the vehicle, according to Turkish court records obtained by The Post.

A brutal campaign of score-settling followed in which more than a dozen people linked to the deal Noor One were murdered. One of the murders had remarkable parallels with the plot of the Angels from Hell It is alleged that Zindashti later orchestrated on behalf of the MOIS of Iran.

In May 2016, a Turkish drug dealer identified as Cetin Koc He was shot dead in Dubai by two hitmen who had traveled from Canada, where they had ties to local narcotics networks. The hitmen became targets upon returning to VancouverThe bullet-riddled body of one was found in a blueberry field and the remains of the other were recovered from a burned-out car, Canadian authorities said.

Speaking to Turkish investigators, Zindashti He admitted that he had motives to kill Blanket, saying that “he sent me threatening messages about ten days before my daughter was murdered.” However, Zindashti claimed to have “nothing to do with the murder.” and dismissed the allegations as “a conspiracy.”

As the killings continued, the target list expanded to include dissidents and journalists deemed disloyal by Tehran.

In 2017,  Saeed Karimian, the founder of a Persian-language television network, GEM TV, was murdered in Istanbul by suspects among whom was a man who Zindashti He acknowledged that he had worked as her driver, according to Turkish court records.

In 2019,  Masoud Molavi, a dissident who had created a popular Telegram channel campaigning against corruption in Iran, was murdered in Istanbul by an attacker who then hid in one of the apartments of Zindashti, according to Turkish archives that refer to the drug lord as the “instigator” of multiple attacks.

In 2020,, Habib Chaab, a political activist who lived in Sweden, was kidnapped during a visit to Türkiye and smuggled by operatives of Zindashti a Iran, where he was tortured and, in 2023, executed, according to security officials. EE. UU, West y Türkiye.

The ruthless efficiency of Zindashti appears to have rekindled Iran’s enthusiasm for working with criminal syndicates after experiments years earlier that ended in failure, officials said. An attempt in 2011 to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Café Milano, a restaurant in Georgetown, collapsed when Iran recruited an incompetent used car salesman from Texas, cousin of an official in Tehran, to handle the plot.

Taking on these assignments may also have paved the way for the return of Zindashti to his native country a few years ago after an arrest and other legal problems forced him to leave Istanbul. The apparent sanctuary provided to Zindashti y Yektaparast suggests that radical religious people Iran They are willing to accommodate criminals who are useful against their enemies, officials said. Yektaparast, who posted photos of his Lamborghini and other luxuries on a social media account Instagram, was killed by unknown assailants in Iran at the beginning of this year.

“Café Milano was, in retrospect, a precursor of what was to come,” said one American intelligence analyst. But it was Zindashti, said the analyst, who brought “a significant change in terms of realizing that this is a lucrative tactic.”

security services Iran have channeled additional resources to support such operations, officials said. Quds Force, an elite paramilitary unit of the IRGC, established a special unit, Department 840, dedicated to assassination operations outside Iran, U.S. and other officials said.

Zindashti has been more closely aligned with the MONTH, which operates as the main home security service of Iran but also has its own assassination branch, officials said. EE. UU Iranian nationals who oppose the government are considered “internal” adversaries, officials said, even when they reside in the sovereign territory of other countries.

El US Department of the Treasury and its equivalent of United Kingdom imposed financial sanctions on Zindashti earlier this year, saying he had carried out “killings and kidnappings under the direction of the MONTH across multiple continents.”

Even as it took advantage of the international reach of Zindashti, Iran has diversified.

A gunman appeared at the door of the Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejad en Brooklyn As of July 2022, he was a member of a vast criminal organization known as Thieves in LawThe phrase refers to a mafia-style code of honor that sworn members are required to follow.

The aggressor, Khalid Mehdiyev, was arrested after being stopped for a traffic violation near the residence of Underlines. Police found an AK-47, 66 bullets and a balaclava in his vehicle, according to a U.S. indictment.

Charges have also been filed against two other alleged members of Thieves in Law accused of having given orders to Mehdiyev. One was based on Iran but was arrested in Uzbekistan and delivered to United States in 2023, officials said. The other was also extradited earlier this year after being arrested in the Czech Republic.

The assassination attempt marked at least the third plot targeting Underlines, a prominent women’s rights advocate in Iran. One focused on an elaborate scheme to kidnap her, escape from New York by boat and board a flight to Iran from Venezuela, according to details revealed by the U.S. Department of the Treasury when it imposed sanctions on security operations in Iran.

Alinejad said she has spent time in more than a dozen safe houses and that the use of criminals by Iran has deepened his concern for his safety. “There are a lot of people in Eastern Europe and other places and it is very easy for them to get a visa and come here to do the work,” he said.

“We’re coming for you”

Iran has repeatedly used that model against Iran International, the satellite station whose journalists have been targeted in at least five deadly plots. Launched in 2017, the network has built gleaming studios in a business park in London and has hired hundreds of employees, including prominent broadcasters BBCPersian and other platforms.

Despite negligible advertising revenue, the station spends lavishly on facilities and salaries, reporting losses that amount to 569 million between 2017 and 2022, the latest year for which figures are available. Executives declined to provide details on the station’s funding, except to acknowledge that much of it comes from sources in Saudi Arabia, one of the main adversaries of Iran.

Viewership has increased, driven by continued coverage of internal protests. During the 2022 uprisings Following the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman beaten by police for alleged violations of the country’s religious dress code, the network aired coverage of the violent internal crackdown, showing Videos of police beatings and other abuses sent by activists and ordinary citizens. As the protests grew, the commander of the IRGC Hossein Salami issued a veiled threat against the network.We warn those who manage these news dissemination systems and lies that seek chaos in our country so that they stop these behaviors,” he said. “They have tested us before. Be careful because we are coming for you.”

A month later, in November of 2022, the station issued a press release saying it had received warnings of bomb and death threats against two of its senior managers. Other plots followed, targeting on-air announcers such as Fardad Farahzad y Sima Sabet.

In February 2023, police arrested an alleged associate of Thieves in Law that had arrived at London on a flight from Vienna, went straight to the headquarters of Iran International and began taking videos of its perimeter security. That same month, the channel moved its production operations to an existing studio in Iran International en Washington, considered safer due to the distance from Tehran and the capabilities of US intelligence agencies.

The suspect of Thieves in Law, Magomed-Husejn Dovtaev, a native of Chechnya de 31 years, was convicted in December for carrying out surveillance for an act of terrorism and received a prison sentence of three and a half years.

Three months later, a trio of alleged attackers arrived at London in the same way as Dovtaev, on flights from European countries that allow easy entry to Britain.

Zeraati considers himself more of a partisan commentator than an impartial journalist, and the editorial tone of his weekly program “Last word” may have made it a priority target. Several weeks before the stabbing, had broadcast an interview with the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who used the appearance to denouncing the IRGC as a “self-proclaimed” terrorist organization. The Iranian news agency Fars He responded by applying the same label to Iran International, calling it a “terrorist” channel that had “offered his antenna to the prime minister, killer of children in Gaza“.

Despite efforts to protect Zeraati, the attack exposed security flaws. Police had removed monitoring devices from his home a year earlier and, although London It is saturated with police surveillance cameras, none had been installed on Zeraati Street.

Alicia Kearns, a British member of Parliament who chaired the Foreign Affairs Committee at the time of the stabbing, said in an interview that he was concerned that police had not stopped the attackers before they could flee the country. “Sadly, there is going to be an increase in hostile states seeking to silence those who speak out against them,” he said.The United Kingdom cannot be a beacon of freedom and democracy “If we cannot stop hostile states from carrying out acts of terrorism on our soil.”

Zeraati He has continued with his program, but his life has changed. After additional stays in safe houses, he and his wife decided this summer to move out. England. They now reside in Jerusalem, a city where they believe they will be safer, close to the regional stories it covers and where the station also has a studio.

He no longer walks with a noticeable limp, he said, but bears scars that “will remain for life.”

(*) The Washington Post

(*) Souad Mekhennet is a national security correspondent. She is the author of “They Told Me to Come Alone: ​​My Journey Behind the Lines of Jihad” and has reported on terrorism for the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune and NPR.

Source: INFOBAE