WASHINGTON, Oct 22 (Reuters) – The United States issued fresh charges over the attempted Tehran plot to kidnap and assassinate an Iranian-American journalist in New York, indicting an Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) official among others in the case, according to a court document on Tuesday.
U.S. prosecutors have previously charged other suspects in the case, including one man in 2022 and two more in January 2023. Tuesday’s filing did not name the alleged victim, but one of the previously charged suspects in the case was arrested for having a rifle outside the Brooklyn home of journalist and activist Masih Alinejad.
“Today’s indictment exposes the full extent of Iran’s plot to silence an American journalist for criticizing the Iranian regime,” said U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Christopher Wray
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The IRGC official, Ruhollah Bazghandi, was a brigadier general who previously served as chief of the corps’ counterintelligence department, according to an indictment unsealed in federal court in Brooklyn.
Bazghandi was previously sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department. Prosecutors said that Bazghandi’s internet activity, as well as that of three other individuals whose names were unsealed on Tuesday, pointed to their involvement in multiple assassination plots.
Bazghandi and the other newly charged defendants are based in Iran and remain at large, prosecutors said. The man arrested outside Alinejad’s home, Khalid Mehdiyev, and another man allegedly involved in the plot, Rafat Amirov, are in U.S. custody and have pleaded not guilty to murder-for-hire charges.
Prosecutors have said that the defendants had plotted to lure Alinejad out of her house by asking her for flowers from her garden then gun her down.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen, Ismail Shakil, Susan Heavey and Brendan Pierson; Editing by Andrea Ricci and Mark Porter)
