October 25, 2024
The Islamic Republic is getting big help from an Iranian drug dealer in finding international criminals to carry out political murders and kidnapings around the world, The Washington Post reported September 12. The newspaper said Naji Sharifi-Zindashti has helped Iran hire members of the Hells Angels biker gang in North America, a Russian mob that calls itself “Thieves in Law” and Scandinavian thugs to go after its enemies, which include Trump Administration officials, but more commonly are Iranian exiles.
The Post said, “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 [Masih Alinejad] 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.”
The Post said that in the last decade since 2014, the Islamic Republic has hired foreign criminals to attack 15 dissidents in Britain alone, the largest locale for its schemes. It has launched nine plots in the US, seven in Turkiye, five in Iraq, four each in the Netherlands and France, three in Germany and one each in Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, the UAE, Sweden, Denmark and Albania, the Post said.
But others tote up much higher figures. Data published by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in August listed 88 assassination, abduction and other violent plots linked to Iran over the past five years exceeding the total for the preceding four decades following the 1979 revolution. At least 14 of those recent cases involved foreign criminal organizations.
“We’re seeing a major escalation in lethal plotting from a government that has used this tactic from the outset,” said Matthew Levitt, a counterterrorism expert at the Washington Institute. Those tabulations tote up plots both successes and failures and there have been more failures than successes.
The Post said Iran has turned to foreign criminals in part from necessity, because its own operatives living abroad are under intense scrutiny from Western governments. Another reason for hiring foreigners has always been to avoid having Iran tabbed for crimes like murder and kidnaping. At the center of this web is an alleged heroin trafficking kingpin based in Iran, Naji Sharifi-Zindashti.
US criminal charges made public earlier this year outline an alleged scheme in which Zindashti negotiated a $350,000 contract with two Hells Angels members in Canada to kill an Iranian Pasdar defector and his wife living in Maryland under false identities created for them by the United States. The name of the targeted defector has not been disclosed, but US officials said the individual had served as an officer in the Pasdaran and become an informant for the CIA.
In another plot, Iran used an Iranian-born member of the German Hells Angels, Ramin Yektaparast. He had fled to Tehran to escape murder charges and was hired by Iran to orchestrate the bombing of a synagogue in Essen. Zindashti has emerged as a linchpin in Iran’s operations. A hulking figure who stands over 6 feet tall and weighs 250 pounds, Zindashti is now in his early 50s, Zindashti acquired his status after emerging triumphant from a bloody regional drug war touched off by one of the largest busts in European history.
It involved a cargo ship named the Noor One that arrived at a Greek port in June 2014 carrying more than two tons of heroin. Zindashti was accused by some of tipping off authorities to undercut rivals. He has survived several attempts on his life, but his daughter and a nephew were killed in 2014 by gunmen who pulled up alongside their Porsche Cayenne in Istanbul, mistakenly believing Zindashti was in the vehicle, according to Turkish court records.
The target list expanded to include dissidents and journalists branded disloyal by Tehran. In 2017, Saeed Karimian, the founder of a Persian language television network, GEM TV, was killed in Istanbul by suspects, including a man that Zindashti acknowledged had worked as his family’s driver, according to the Turkish court records.
In 2019, Masoud Molavi, a dissident who had created a popular Telegram channel that campaigned against corruption in Iran, was killed in Istanbul by an assailant who then hid in one of Zindashti’s apartments, according to the Turkish files. In 2020, Habib Chaab, a political activist living in Sweden, was abducted during a visit to Turkiye and smuggled by Zindashti operatives to Iran, where he was tortured and, in 2023, executed.
The Post said, “Zindashti’s ruthless effectiveness appears to have reignited Iran’s enthusiasm for working with criminal syndicates, after experiments years earlier ended in failure.” An attempt in 2011 to assassinate the Saudi ambassador at Cafe Milano, a Washington, DC, restaurant, unraveled when Iran enlisted a hapless used-car salesman from Texas the cousin of a Pasdar officer in Tehran to manage the plot.”
Taking on these assignments may also have paved the way for Zindashti’s return several years ago to his native country after an arrest and other legal problems prompted him to abandon Istanbul. The apparent sanctuary provided Zindashti and Yektaparast suggests that Iran’s religious hardliners are willing to accommodate criminals who are useful against their enemies, officials said. Yektaparast, who posted photos of his Lamborghini and other luxury trappings on an Instagram account, was killed by unknown assailants in Iran earlier this year.
Even while taking advantage of Zindashti’s international reach, Iran has diversified. A gunman who showed up at the Brooklyn doorstep of Iranian American journalist Masih Alinejad in July 2022 was a member of a sprawling criminal organization known as Thieves in Law. The phrase refers to a mafia-style honor code that sworn members are bound to follow.
The assailant, Khalid Mehdiyev, was arrested after being pulled over for a traffic violation near Alinejad’s residence. Police found an AK-47, 66 rounds of ammunition and a ski mask in his vehicle, according to a US indictment. Charges have also been filed against two other suspected Thieves in Law members alleged to have given Mehdiyev his orders.
One was based in Iran but apprehended in Uzbekistan and turned over to the United States in 2023, officials said. The other was also extradited earlier this year after being arrested in the Czech Republic. The Islamic Republic was aghast at the Post report. Its mission at the UN issued a statement saying, “These falsehoods are the result of the Zionist regime, the Albania-based Mojahedin-e Khalq terrorist organization, and certain Western intelligence agencies, including those of the United States, aimed at distracting from the atrocities perpetrated by the Israeli regime.”
