Iran is increasingly resorting to local criminal gangs to target or silence dissidents and journalists abroad. A 'dirty' job for which it seems to be using its own secret agents less and less. This is highlighted by a long investigation by the Washington Post, based on interviews with senior officials from a dozen countries, as well as analysis of hundreds of pages of court records in the United States and Europe and classified documents obtained from the security services. The picture that emerges reveals how Iran cultivates and exploits links with criminal networks that are behind a recent wave of violent plans orchestrated by elite units of the Revolutionary Guards (pasdaran) and the Iranian intelligence ministry.
The alarming evolution in the tactics of a nation, which US and Western security officials consider one of the most dangerous practitioners of "transnational repression" in the world, is demonstrated by the American newspaper citing the stabbing in London of a journalist from Iran International, a reference broadcaster for the Iranian opposition abroad but declared a terrorist organization by Tehran, which also accused it of fomenting the anti-government protests that broke out in 2022 in the wake of the death in custody of Mahsa Amini.
Last March, Pouria Zeraat was stabbed outside his home in Wimbledon, despite a series of measures, such as the installation of monitoring devices in his home, put in place by the London Metropolitan Police to protect the journalist. British authorities had gone even further to defend Iran International, assigning a team of undercover officers to defend the channel's employees, arresting a suspect caught monitoring office entrances, deploying armored vehicles outside its headquarters and, over a period of seven months last year, convincing the network to temporarily relocate to Washington.
None of these measures managed to protect Zeraati. On March 29, he was stabbed four times and left bleeding on the sidewalk by assailants who were not from Iran and had no apparent ties to its security services, according to British investigators. Investigators alleged that Iran had hired criminals in Eastern Europe who encountered few obstacles in getting past security checks at Heathrow Airport. After spending days tracking Zeraati, they then carried out the ambush from which their victim survived, perhaps intentionally, to avoid the consequences that would have resulted from the murder of a citizen with a British passport as well.
In recent years, Iran has 'outsourced' lethal operations and kidnappings involving, depending on the country, biker gangs, the so-called 'Thieves in Law' (a notorious Russian underworld network), a heroin distribution organization led by an Iranian drug trafficker, and violent criminal groups from Scandinavia and South America.
Thanks to hitmen hired in the criminal underworld, Iran has commissioned plans to eliminate - among others - a former Iranian military official living under an assumed identity in Maryland, an Iranian-American journalist in exile in Brooklyn, a women's rights activist in Switzerland, LGBTQ+ activists in Germany and at least five journalists from Iran International, as well as dissidents and critics of the regime in other countries. Last month, the Department of Justice filed charges against a Pakistani man with ties to Iran, accused of trying to hire an assassin to assassinate political figures in the United States, including possibly former President Donald Trump.
