Report: Iran hiring Hells Angels to target defectors in US and Europe

The Islamic Republic of Iran has been hiring Hells Angels and other criminal groups embedded in western nations to target their critics in exile. A bombshell report by The Washington Post claims Tehran has recruited thugs to abduct and assassinate Iranian dissidents in democratic nations including the US, Germany and the UK.

The Russian gang ‘Thieves in Law,’ an Iranian drug trafficker and violent groups from Scandinavia to South America have reportedly been recruited by Iran’s rulers to carry out their orders. A former Iranian military officer hiding in Maryland, an Iranian-American journalist in Brooklyn and a dissident in London are among the exiles targeted by the Iranian regime in the west.

Iranian journalist Pouria Zeraati, a British citizen, was stabbed four times on the sidewalk outside his home on March 29 in Wimbledon, a London suburb. The attack came after years of threats and intimidation that led him to relocate to safe houses for a while. London’s Metropolitan Police believes that Tehran hired criminals from Eastern Europe to carry out the attack. Detectives said criminals tracked Zeraati for days and fled on a flight just hours after the ambush. Officials believe the attackers may have wanted Zeraati to survive the stabbing in order to scare him but avoid an international scandal. Zeraati’s attackers have not been caught.

MI5 and the Metropolitan Police have tracked over 16 plots from the Islamic Republic in the last two years, The Post reported. According to the Washington Institute, there have been 88 assassination, abduction and other violent plots linked to Iran over the past five years. At least 14 of them involved criminal groups.

In the US, the Justice Department filed charges last month against a Pakistani man with ties to Iran who allegedly was looking to hire a hit man to kill politicians, including possibly former president Donald Trump. Former Trump officials Mike Pompeo and John Bolton have also been targeted in plots by Tehran as revenge for the US killing of Iranian Revolutionary Guard leader Qasem Soleimani.

In Brooklyn, officials foiled a plot to kill America-Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad that involved Thieves in Law member Khalid Mehdiyev, showing up to her doorstep. Alinejad has been the target of at least three plots, with one that centered on kidnapping her from New York and taking her to Venezuela via boat. ‘There are a lot of people in Eastern Europe and other places and it’s very easy for them to get a visa and come here to do the job,’ she told The Post.

Tehran has also reportedly outsourced assassinations and abductions to Iranian drug trafficker Naji Sharifi Zindashti (Pictured), described as a ‘Pablo Escobar-type narco-trafficker.’ In Turkey, activist Habib Chaab, who was based in Sweden, was abducted in 2020 during a visit to Turkey. He was smuggled out by by Zindashti operatives to Iran, where he was punished and executed in 2023.

Zindashti is also accused in of negotiating a $350,000 contract with two Hells Angels members in Canada to kill an Iranian defector and his wife, who were hiding under false identities in Maryland. The defector has not been named but identified as a former officer in the IRGC who became an informant for the CIA. The point man in the failed plot targeting the defector was named as Damion Ryan (pictured), 43, who has a lengthy criminal record in Canada. He is accused of enlisting Adam R. Pearson, 29, who was hiding in Minneapolis to escape arrest on murder charges in Canada.

German officials say Tehran recruited a fugitive Hells Angels boss, Ramin Yektaparast (pictured), to organize and carry out terror attacks against synagogues. Amid the war in Gaza, Tehran has also been connected to plots against US and Israeli officials in France and Germany. As The Post notes, other authoritarian regimes around the world have started to use Tehran’s strategy of recruiting criminals in the west.

A Sikh activist was killed in Canada last year and another was targeted in New York by criminals hired by India’s security services. Meanwhile Russia hired mobsters in Spain last year to kill a military pilot who had defected to Ukraine and resettled in the Mediterranean. Iran denied the claims when reached by The Post. ‘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,’ Tehran’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.’

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