American prosecutors have charged three men they say acted for Iran with orchestrating a campaign of nearly 20 terrorist attacks and attempted attacks on Jewish communities in Europe and the United States, including a plot against a British air base used by the US Air Force.
The eight-count superseding indictment, unsealed on Tuesday in federal court in Manhattan, names Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood al-Saadi, 32, a dual Iranian-Iraqi national; Mohsen Mohajeri, 48, an Iranian national; and Mohammad Ali al-Hassani, 35, an Iraqi national. Prosecutors say the men worked for Kata’ib Hizballah and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, both designated by Washington as foreign terrorist organisations.
Only al-Saadi is in custody. He was arrested abroad on 1 May and transferred to the United States, where he was charged in late May and has pleaded not guilty to the earlier counts. The other two men were in Iran at the time of the alleged Fairford plot, prosecutors said.
The most serious new allegation concerns RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire, which housed American bombers and service personnel. Prosecutors say al-Hassani directed associates in Britain to prepare the attack from August, paying one man to survey the base’s perimeter and others to procure vans, barrels of fuel, chemical accelerants and metal objects that could be used as shrapnel. The vans were fitted with decals to make them look like they belonged to a fuel delivery business and a swimming pool supply company.
On 26 September, three white vans set off towards the base. At least two were stopped at a security roadblock, and in the early hours of 27 September British police recovered the vans and arrested their occupants. Iran has denied any involvement in the Fairford episode.
Remarkably, prosecutors allege that al-Saadi helped coordinate the plot from inside a federal jail in New York, passing coded messages to his co-defendants through phone calls with family members in Iraq. In one call in late September, days before the vans were intercepted, he is said to have told his family to give al-Hassani money “so we can do it”.
The indictment also links the men to about 18 attacks across Europe in the spring, most of them in Britain, carried out under the name of a purportedly new group, Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiya, which prosecutors say is a front for Kata’ib Hizballah. They included arson attacks, explosives and the near-fatal stabbing of two Jewish men in London, one of them a dual American-British citizen. In April, prosecutors say, al-Hassani directed an attack on a London synagogue by video call, telling the attacker to “light it up like a Christmas tree”.
Al-Saadi is also accused of attempting to bomb a synagogue in Manhattan in March and April. Attorney General Todd Blanche said anyone who plots an attack on a base housing American service members “will be prosecuted by the United States government”. US Attorney Jamie McDonald said the threat from Iran and Iran-backed groups “is not hypothetical — it is very real”. All of the allegations are charges that have not yet been tested in court.
Sources: US Department of Justice, Southern District of New York (https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/three-iranian-backed-operatives-indicted-their-roles-nearly-20-terrorist-attacks-and-0); Associated Press (https://apnews.com).
