January 10, 2020
his brother Meti (right) pose with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in their Ontario offices.
Two Iranian-born men have pleaded guilty to acting as illegal agents of Iran for monitoring a Jewish center in Chicago and members of the Mojahedin-e Khalq, the US Justice Department and FBI have announced.
Majid Ghorbani, 60, an Iranian citizen and US permanent resident living in Costa Mesa, California, pleaded guilty November 4 to one count of violating US sanctions.
Ahmadreza Mohammadi-Doostdar, 39, a dual Iranian-US citizen, pleaded guilty October 8 to one count of conspiracy and one count of acting as an undeclared agent of the Iranian government.
Ghorbani was arrested in August 2018, and Doostdar the next month. Both were accused of conducting surveillance and collecting information about Americans involved with the Mojahedin-e Khalq.
“The Iranian government thought it could get away with conducting surveillance on individuals in the United States by sending one of its agents here to task a permanent resident with conducting and collecting that surveillance,” US Attorney Jessie K. Liu of the District of Columbia said in a statement.
Doostdar and Ghorbani are awaiting sentencing following agreements with prosecutors to plead guilty to reduced charges. Each has been in custody since his arrest.
According to charging documents released last year, Doostdar entered the United States in about July 2017, allegedly to gather intelligence about targets considered enemies of the Tehran government, and made contact with Ghorbani.
Prosecutors translated Ghorbani’s recorded remarks in Farsi as saying he “penetrated” the Mojahedin-e Khalq to send information back to Tehran for “targeting” packages — data the FBI said can be used for the neutralization, arrest, recruitment, or cyber exploitation of a target, as well as “capture/kill operations.”
The FBI said Ghorbani named two Washington-based men he surveilled, Alireza Jafarzadeh and Ali Safavi, both Mojahedin activists.
Ghorbani, prosecutors said in a court filing, “noted of one of the subjects, ‘[expletive] is … working for Mossad now … he is one of those [expletive] Jews … I swear; [expletive] needs one — one shot.”
Ghorbani’s attorney, Assistant Federal Defender Mary M. Petras, said that Ghorbani’s alleged statements were translated and out of context, and she denied that he posed a serious risk of flight. He has lived for 20 years in the United States since immigrating with his parents, sister and brother, lives with his younger brother in Orange County, California, and had worked as a waiter at the same Persian restaurant for a decade, she said.
Prosecutors alleged that Ghorbani was paid $2,000 by Doostdar in late 2017 after turning over photographs of demonstrators at a September 20, 2017, Mojahedin rally in New York City against the Iranian government. An FBI affidavit also said that Ghorbani traveled to Iran to conduct an “in-person briefing” in March and allegedly discussed clandestine methods to provide photos he took of an Iran Freedom Convention for Human Rights in Washington, DC, on May 4, 2018.
Petras said that Ghorbani was accused of taking “photographs of two events” and “two known individuals,” containing information that is publicly available on the Internet, including in videos and data uploaded by the Mojahedin-e Khalq itself.
