U.S. Charges Iranian Revolutionary Guards Official in Assassination Plot
The New York Times
The failed plot to kill Masih Alinejad, a human-rights activist, has already led to murder-for-hire charges against members of an Eastern European criminal organization with ties to Iran.
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan charged a senior official in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps of Iran and three other men with connections to the country’s government with participating in a failed plot to assassinate a human-rights activist in Brooklyn in 2022, according to a new indictment made public on Tuesday.
The plot to kill the activist, Masih Alinejad, who has criticized Iran’s repression of women, was disrupted by the U.S. government and has already led to federal murder-for-hire charges against members of an Eastern European criminal organization with ties to Iran who were tasked with carrying out the assignment.
The new charges are the first to directly accuse a high-ranking official in the Revolutionary Guards with a role in the plot. The group is Iran’s primary military force, executing its foreign policy across the Middle East and controlling much of the country’s economy.
The official, Ruhollah Bazghandi, is described in the indictment as a brigadier general with the Revolutionary Guards whom the U.S. Treasury Department last year called a counterintelligence official.
The Treasury Department, in imposing sanctions on Mr. Bazghandi, said he had been involved with the detention of foreign prisoners in Iran, as well as in assassination plots against journalists, Israeli citizens and other people deemed enemies of Iran.
Ms. Alinejad, who lived in Brooklyn but who has since moved elsewhere in New York, wrote in a 2020 article that the Iranian government had called for her abduction through a social media campaign.
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