Iran turns to Hells Angels and other criminal gangs to target critics
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(Rob Dobi for The Washington Post)
Iran turns to Hells Angels and other criminal gangs to target critics
Washington Post-Sept12th2024
Police assigned a team of undercover officers to safeguard the channel’s employees, arrested a suspect caught surveilling the station’s entrances, put armored cars outside its headquarters and, for one seven-month stretch last year, convinced the network to move temporarily to Washington.
None of these measures managed to protect Zeraati from the plot that Iran is suspected of setting in motion this year. On March 29, he was stabbed four times and left bleeding on the sidewalk outside his home in the London suburb of Wimbledon by assailants 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 as they cleared security checks at Heathrow Airport, spent days tracking Zeraati and then caught departing flights just hours after carrying out an ambush that their victim survived — perhaps intentionally, investigators said, to serve as a warning but not trigger the fallout 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 U.S. and Western security officials consider one of the world’s most determined and dangerous practitioners of “transnational repression,” a term for governments’ use of violence and intimidation in others’ sovereign territory to silence dissidents, journalists and others deemed disloyal.
Senior security officials said that the use of criminal proxies by governments has compounded the difficulty of protecting those who have sought refuge in the United States, Europe and elsewhere. Security services formerly focused on tracking operatives from Russia’s GRU spy agency or Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) now confront plots handed off — often through encrypted channels — to criminal networks deeply embedded in Western society.
In recent years, Iran has outsourced lethal operations and abductions to Hells Angels biker gangs, a notorious Russian mob network known as “Thieves in Law,” a heroin distribution syndicate led by an Iranian narco-trafficker and violent criminal groups from Scandinavia to South America.
This story reveals new details about how Iran has cultivated and exploited connections to criminal networks that are behind a recent wave of violent plots secretly orchestrated by elite units in the IRGC and Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence (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 and Europe, as well as additional investigative documents obtained by The Washington Post from security services.
With hit men it has hired in the criminal underworld, Iran has commissioned plots against a former Iranian military officer living under an assumed identity in Maryland, an exiled Iranian American journalist in Brooklyn, a women’s rights activist in Switzerland, LGBTQ+ activists in Germany and at least five journalists at Iran International, as well as dissidents and regime critics in a half dozen other countries, according to interviews and records.
Read moe on original:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/09/12/iran-criminal-gangs-target-dissidents/
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