July 14, 2021: Four members of an alleged Iranian spy network have been charged with plotting the kidnap of an Iranian-American journalist and activist based in New York.
According to the indictment, the spy network was looking for ways to evacuate the journalist from his home in Brooklyn and take him to sea by speedboat and then to Venezuela, which maintains friendly relations with Tehran. William Sweeney, head of the FBI’s New York office, admitted the allegations sounded like a “film conspiracy of some distance.” “We have accused a group, backed by the Iranian government, of plotting to kidnap an American-American journalist here on its soil and forcibly return him to Iran,” Sweeney said. “Not on our watch.”
The speedboat scheme was considered only after a failed attempt to persuade the target’s family to lure her to a third country in the Middle East, after which she may have been intercepted by Iranian agents.
The target has only been named Victim 1, but Masih al-Nejad, a controversial critic of the Tehran government based in New York, has confirmed that she was the victim. “About eight months or so ago, the FBI warned me that a conspiracy was being hatched against me,” Illinois told the Guardian in an email Tuesday evening. “It’s not news at all. I get death threats every day,” I said. The next thing the FBI told me was that I was being targeted, that I was being monitored for photos and videos in an intelligence ministry operation. “The plot is horrific, but the FBI backed me up. My family lived in three safe houses for three months.”
According to US allegations, the plot to assassinate Alinejad was part of a larger operation by the Iranian intelligence ministry in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United Arab Emirates. Advertisement In each case, the strategy seems to be the same: private investigative agencies were hijacked under false pretenses to monitor the victim. “As alleged, the four suspects monitored and plotted to kidnap an Iranian-American citizen who has been critical of the government’s sovereignty and will forcibly take their wanted victim to Iran. Where the fate of the victim would be completely uncertain,” Audrey Strauss, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York said.
The spy network is alleged to have consisted of Alireza Shavaroghi Farahani, a 50-year-old senior Iranian intelligence official, who ran a network of three agents who are accused of having coordinated surveillance operations from Tehran, and organized a money-laundering scheme to pay for it. The three others were named Mahmoud Khazein, aged 42; Kiya Sadeghi, 35 and Omid Noori, 45. All of them are believed to be in Iran. An Iranian-American, Niloufar “Nellie” Bahadorifar, a 46-year-old based in California, was arrested at the beginning of the month and charged separately with providing financial services in support of the plot.
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According to the indictment, Alinejad was targeted for her campaign against the compulsory use of hijab head coverings for Iranian women. In July 2019, the head of the revolutionary courts warned that anyone caught sending Alinejad video material that undermined or criticized hijab laws would be committing the crime of cooperating with a hostile foreign government and would face up to 10 years in prison.
The indictment claimed the plot to kidnap her from New York began in June 2020, when members of the alleged network hired a New York private detective agency to carry out surveillance of Alinejad, under the cover story that one of her friends had fled the Middle East with unpaid bills and her debtors were trying to find them. There is no evidence presented in the indictment that the plot progressed beyond the research of the alleged abduction route.
The same alleged network is accused of carrying out surveillance on three targets in Canada and one in the UK, where beginning on 17 September 2020, it hired private investigators to conduct surveillance on an unnamed “Iranian expatriate journalist and political commentator”. The British investigators are said to have taken pictures of the journalist’s home. Farahani is also alleged to have ordered the surveillance of targets in the UAE.
Alinejad, who has clashed with other Iranian-Americans over her campaign against hijab regulations, and over US diplomatic overtures to Tehran, insisted she was undeterred.
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