Hells Angels, a synagogue shooting and Iran’s shady hand in Germany

Bullet holes in a glass door at the Old Synagogue in Essen, Germany, on Nov. 18. (Justin Brosch/AP)

Hells Angels, a synagogue shooting and Iran’s shady hand in Germany

Washington post-March 6th2023

ESSEN, Germany — The two bullets, believed to have been fired by a hooded figure who briefly appeared on the security cameras in the dead of night, gouged the reinforced glass of a door at the Old Synagogue in this northwestern German city. A third bullet hit the door’s metal frame.

“It’s a new escalation,” Uri Kaufmann, the director of the Jewish cultural center now run in the building, said earlier this year as he pointed out the damage from the November attack. “But shoot the building — this is really shocking.”

The alleged orchestrator, according to five German security officials and two Western intelligence officials, was Ramin Yektaparast: a muscled Hells Angels leader wanted in the case of a gruesome biker gang murder in Germany. Yektaparast is suspected of directing attacks from Tehran, through his criminal networks in Germany, allegedly at the behest of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the officials say.

Those attacks are part of what Germany’s security services see as an uptick in Iranian regime activity aimed at Jewish targets as well as the Iranian diaspora in Germany. That would be in line with a reported increase in Iranian assassination and kidnapping threats in Europe and the United States. Analysts say that while facing protests at home, Iran is increasingly going after what it sees as foreign threats to the regime and is using criminal gangs to add a cloak of deniability.

“They are increasing the pressure and trying to make some groups feel insecure. It is not acceptable at all,” said Roderich Kiesewetter, a German parliamentarian who has pushed for tougher action in response to Tehran’s heavy-handed crackdown on domestic protests but has only succeeded in getting himself banned from entering Iran.

Germany and Iran have engaged in tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats since a court in Tehran last month sentenced a German man of Iranian origin to death. Iran’s judiciary accused Jamshid Sharmahd, who also was a U.S. resident, of leading a U.S.-based group seeking restoration of the monarchy in Iran and having “planned 23 terror attacks,” of which “five were successful.” Outside of what human rights groups say was a forced confession, the 67-year-old has maintained that he was only a spokesman for the group and had no role in the attacks.