The Washington Post is reporting that the Iranian government has increased its ties with criminal networks overseas to carry out attacks on its critics in the United States and Europe.
In recent years, the report says, Iran has outsourced deadly operations and kidnappings to criminal gangs such as Hell’s Angels, a notorious Russian mob network known as the “Thieves of Law,” a heroin distribution syndicate led by an Iranian drug trafficker and violent criminal groups from Scandinavia to South America.
The report refers to one attack that targeted Pouria Zeraati, a journalist for the Persian-language network Iran International. She was stabbed and wounded in front of her London home in April.
The attack was attributed to Iran, but none of the attackers were Iranian, and they didn’t have significant ties to Iranian security services.
According to officials, Iran recruited criminals in Eastern Europe who arrived in the U.K. through Heathrow Airport without any problems and had been monitoring Zeraati for a long time.
VOA has reported previously on other alleged Iran plots to target critics in the U.S.
Last month, the U.S. Justice Department unsealed charges against a 46-year-old Pakistani man, Asif Merchant, in connection with an Iranian plot to kill a politician or U.S. government official.
Earlier this year, the U.S. charged three men, one of whom was based in Iran, in a plot to murder two U.S. residents in the state of Maryland.
Last year, the U.S. Justice Department announced three members of an Eastern European criminal gang with ties to the Iranian government were indicted in a plot to kill Masih Alinejad, an Iranian American human rights activist and VOA Persian TV host.
Although the indictment did not say whether Iranian officials orchestrated the plot, U.S. law enforcement officials accused Tehran of direct involvement.
According to The Washington Post, Iran’s cooperation with criminal groups, rather than using its covert agents, represents a worrying shift in governance methods that U.S. and other Western security officials consider one of the most dangerous acts of “transnational repression” in the world.
The Post said the report is based on interviews with senior officials in more than a dozen countries, a review of hundreds of pages of criminal court records in the United States and Europe, as well as investigative documents obtained from the security services.
