Three men indicted for murder-for-hire plot on US soil on behalf of Iran

One Iranian and two Canadian nationals have been charged with conspiracy to use interstate commerce in the commission of a murder-for-hire plot to assassinate two Maryland residents, one of whom defected from Iran, on American soil, the US Justice Department announced on Monday. 

Naji Sharifi Zindshati, an Iranian national, and Canadians Adam Richard Pearson and Damion Patrick John Ryan allegedly used an encrypted messaging service to recruit assassins and to plan the logistics of the murder. A third Canadian, Adam Richard Pearson, affiliated with the Hell’s Angels biker gang, is also accused of having participated, but was not indicted with the others.

Concurrent with the Justice Department’s indictment, the Treasury Department placed sanctions on Zindshati and several associates, naming Zindshati as a narcotics trafficker at the head of an assassination network that targets Iranian dissidents on behalf of the country’s authoritarian regime. The alleged co-conspirators, the Canadian Pearson and Ryan, are already incarcerated for unrelated criminal charges. 

“Zindshati’s network,” the Treasury Department alleged in a statement, “has carried out numerous acts of transnational repression including assassinations and kidnappings across multiple jurisdictions in an attempt to silence the Iranian regime’s perceived critics.” 

US officials: plot is one of many by Iranian regime in recent years

The network operates, according to the Treasury Department, “at the behest of Iran’s Intelligence and Security Ministry (MOIS),” an organ that has, alongside the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) “long targeted perceived regime opponents…outside of Iran, a practice that the regime has accelerated in recent years.” 

“A wide range of dissidents, journalists, activists, and former Iranian officials have been targeted for assassination, kidnapping, and hacking operations across numerous countries in the Middle East, Europe, and North America,” the statement said, adding that the Iranian regime “increasingly relies on organized criminal groups…to obscure links to the Government of Iran and maintain plausible deniability.”

The department cited several examples, including the assassination of the Dutch-Ahwazi activist Ahmad Molla Niss in The Hague in 2017, the kidnapping of Iranian-German activist Jamshid Sharmahd and subsequent death sentence after a “sham trial” in Iran, and the kidnapping from Iraq of Ruhollah Zam, a journalist, who was tortured and executed in Iran in December 2020. 

“To those in Iran who plot murders on US soil and the criminal actors who work with them, let today’s charges send a clear message: the Department of Justice will pursue you as long as it takes – and wherever you are – and deliver justice,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division.