Iran hires Hells Angels, other criminal gangs to hunt down regime critics - Washington Post

Iran hired Eastern European criminals to attack Iran International journalist Pouria Zeraati, the Washington Post reported on Thursday. 

Zeraati was stabbed four times in March and left bleeding on a sidewalk. 

British investigators told the Washington Post that the attackers had not been from Iran and had no discernible connection to its security services. 

The attackers had reportedly been criminals hired from Eastern Europe who faced few barriers to entering Britain via Heathrow Airport in the days before the attack - and flying out just hours after the stabbing.

“We deny any link to this story of this so-called journalist,” the country’s ambassador to the United Kingdom said in a post on X the day after the attack.

Investigators said that it might not have been a mistake that Zeraati had survived the attack but that it had, perhaps, been intended as a warning to fellow critics.

The Washington Post said that this was just one case highlighting Iran’s exploitation of criminal networks behind a number of recent plots orchestrated by the IRGC and Iran’s Intelligence Ministry. The publication said it surmised this following interviews with senior officials in more than a dozen countries and a review of hundreds of criminal court documents from the US and Europe.

Hells Angels

Iran had also allegedly commissioned plots against a former Iranian military officer living under an assumed identity in the US, an exiled Iranian-American journalist in Brooklyn, a women’s rights activist in Switzerland, multiple LGBTQ+ activists in Germany, and at least five journalists in Iran International.

Earlier this year, the US Justice Department filed criminal charges against Naji Sharifi Zindashti after he allegedly sought a $350,000 USD contract with two Hells Angels in Canada to kill a defector and his wife.

The hired Hells Angels assassins had reportedly exchanged encrypted messages with Zindashti, where they promised the murder would be symbolically vicious, according to the report.

This was reportedly not the only contracted relationship between the Islamic regime and Hells Angels. Iran reportedly hired a German Angel to orchestrate the bombing of a synagogue in Essen. The German member,  Ramin Yektaparast, reportedly fled to Tehran to avoid murder charges. 

Since 2014, Britain has seen the most attacks and plots on dissidents by Iran (18), closely followed by the United States, with nine recorded by the Washington Post. Turkey has seen five attacks and or plots, while Iraq has seen 5. A number of countries members of the European Union have also been host to Iran’s attacks and plots on dissidents, including France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, and others.

Iran denies reports

Iran has denied targeting dissidents in foreign nations, blaming Israel and a variety of other countries for the “concoctions.”

“The Islamic Republic of Iran harbors neither the intent nor the plan to engage in assassination or abduction operations, whether in the West or any other country,” Iran’s mission to the United Nations said in a statement. “These fabrications are concoctions of the Zionist regime, the Albania-based Mujahedin-e Khalq terrorist cult, and certain Western intelligence services—including those of the United States—to divert attention from the atrocities committed by the Israeli regime.”