WASHINGTON: Four Iranian citizens were charged on Tuesday on charges of planning to kidnap journalists in New York and smuggle it out of the country to Iran, the Ministry of Justice said.
US journalists and activists are still almighted, which are Iranian descent and are critics bluntly against the Tehran government, confirmed on Twitter that he was the target of the alleged plot.
“I thank the FBI to frustrate the Islamic Republic of the plot of the Iranian intelligence ministry to kidnap me,” he said, with the video clip standing nearby with a police car on the road outside, flashing lights.
“This plot is set under Rouhani,” he added, referring to Iranian President Hassan Rouhi, widely seen as moderate politics.
Alinejad established my secretive movement that was silently, which encouraged women to eliminate their headscarves.
The four men mentioned in the indictment were Iranian intelligence officials and three officers who worked underneath, according to a statement from the Ministry of Justice.
It is said they all live in Iran.
The fifth co-conspirator in California was accused of financing allegations of operations.
According to the charges of the Department of Justice, intelligence officers first tried in 2018 to force their kidnapping target relatives, referred to as victims-1, to lure to third countries to be arrested and taken to Iran to be imprisoned.
They then moved to survey victims and members of his household in Brooklyn, New York “on several occasions in 2020 and 2021,” said the statement of the Ministry of Justice.
Agents employ private investigators for “surveils, photos and video recording” their target, according to the charging sheet.
Allegedly that men examined how to bring alonejad from the United States to Iran.
One of the accusers allegedly viewed the route from his home to the beach neighborhood in Brooklyn, while others were researching “services that offer a military-style speedboat for the own operated maritime evacuation from Manhattan.” They also examined the way to get their kidnapping victims from New York by sea to Venezuela, who had a close relationship with Tehran.
The charges said that in July 2019, Iran’s revolutionary court head said that anyone who sent a video attacked the regime, especially contrary to the law that women had to cover their heads, “committing a crime in collaboration with the hostile foreign government.
And will be sentenced to 10 prisoners.
Year.
“The Iranian network found by the FBI also includes other targets in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates, and has tried to spread similar monitoring methods there, the indictment said.
The four agents were identified as Alireza Shavaroghi Farahani, Mahmoud Khazein, Kiya Sadeghi and Omid Noori.
Iran the fifth living in California, Niloufar Bahadorifar, allegedly helped finance the plot.
“Everyone in the United States must be free of harassment, threats and physical damage by foreign powers,” said the assistant assistant attorney General Mark Lesko in the statement of the Ministry of Justice.
Iran is considered to be one of the most repressive regimes for journalists in the world, mobilizing “relentless control” for the flow of information in the country, according to journalists without limits.
NGOs said 860 journalists had been arrested, imprisoned and in several cases held since the 1979 Revolution.
In January 2016, Iran exchanged Journalist Jailed Washington Post Jason Beaga for seven Iranians in the United States.
The reaction was arrested along with his wife in July 2014, while Iran was negotiating on its nuclear program, which Western allegedly had military applications.
While his wife was released after two months, he was accused of spying on the United States and spent 544 days in Prison Evin who was famous in North Tehran, where he said that he experienced shortages of sleep and threatened with beheading.
Iran has more than a dozen Westerners, most of them are also Iranian passport holders; In prison or under house arrest, including the academic French-Iran Fariba Adelkhah, who has been jailed for two years.