U.S. charges Iranian revolutionary guards in alleged plot to assassinate human rights activist
An official with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Ruhollah Bazghandi, has been charged in a plot to kill an Iranian-American author and women’s rights activist in the United States.
Mr Bazghandi and three others were charged in the updated indictment against those accused of trying to kill journalist Masih Alinejad.
The failed plot to assassinate Ms Alinejad, a journalist, in Brooklyn in 2022 has also led to murder-for-hire charges against members of an Eastern European criminal organisation with ties to Iran.
Ms Alinejad had been accused of criticising Iran’s repression of women and was disrupted by the U.S. government.
The Iranian opposition activist and journalist lived in exile in New York City. She fled the country following the country’s disrupted 2009 presidential election.
However, the Treasury Department, in imposing sanctions on Mr Bazghandi, said he had been involved with the detention of foreign prisoners in Iran.
It also said the assassination plots against journalists, Israeli citizens and other people deemed enemies of Iran.
In 2020, Ms Alinejad wrote an article that the Iranian government had called for her abduction through a social media campaign.
“The Iranian regime always uses criminal gangs to do their dirty jobs beyond their own borders, to get away from punishment, to get away from accountability,” she said.
According to her, the new charges showed the direct involvement of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in such plots.
“It is very significant that now we have proof that I.R.G.C. members, the senior members of the Revolutionary Guards, were sitting in Iran and ordering a guy in New York to kill a U.S. citizen,” Ms Alinejad added.
She said she was now “more determined to give voice to Iranian people, especially women, who actually face the same killers within their country.”
The new charges are the first to directly accuse a high-ranking official in the Revolutionary Guards of having 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 its economy.
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