The London Metropolitan Police had installed monitoring devices in the home of the Iranian exile journalist in the months prior to his attackers tracking him down. They had also given him a secret method to alert rescue units.

The British authorities have done more to protect Iran International. This satellite news channel based in London airs the weekly show of journalist Pouria Zeeraati and has built a following of millions of Iranians despite the fact that it is outlawed.

The police assigned an undercover team to protect the employees of the channel, arrested a man who was caught spying on the station’s doors, placed armored vehicles outside the headquarters, and convinced the network, last year, to temporarily move to Washington for a seven-month period.

Zeraati was not protected by any of these measures from the plot Iran is suspected to have set in motion this past year. According to British investigators, on March 29, Zeraati was stabbed 4 times and left bleeding outside his home in Wimbledon, a London suburb. The attackers were not Iranian and did not appear to have any connection with its security services.

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Officials claim that Iran instead hired criminals from Eastern Europe to carry out the ambush. They spent days tracking Zeraati, and caught departing flights only hours after the attack.

Iran’s alleged use of criminals instead of covert operatives highlighted an alarming change in tactics from a country that U.S. officials and Western security officials regard as one of the most determined and dangerous practitioners in the world of “transnational violence,” which is a term used to describe governments using violence and intimidation on other sovereign territories in order to silence dissidents and journalists, and other individuals deemed unloyal.

Senior security officials stated that governments’ use of criminal proxy agents has made it harder to protect those who have sought asylum in the United States and Europe. Previously, security services focused on tracking operatives of the Russian GRU spy agency and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. (IRGC). Now they are faced with plots passed along – often via encrypted channels – to criminal networks embedded deeply in Western society.

Iran has been outsourcing lethal operations to Hells Angels motorcycle gangs and a Russian mob known as “Thieves In Law”, a heroin distribution network led by a narcotrafficker from Iran, and violent criminal organizations in Scandinavia and South America.

This article reveals new information about the ways in which Iran has cultivated, and then exploited, connections with criminal networks. These connections are responsible for a recent wave of violent attacks secretly orchestrated and carried out by elite units of the IRGC as well as Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence. The Washington Post obtained additional documents from the security services and a number of interviews with senior officials across more than a dozen nations.

Iran, using hit men from the criminal underworld to carry out its plots, has targeted a former Iranian officer who lived under an assumed name in Maryland, a journalist exiled in Brooklyn, a Swiss women’s rights advocate, LGBTQ+ activists, and at least five Iranian journalists, according interviews and records.

Other nations are beginning to adopt this strategy. According to U.S. officials and Canadian officials, India’s security forces enlisted criminal gangs to kill a Sikh militant in Canada and to target another in New York last year. Russia, which traditionally relies on its agents to carry out lethal operations in order to achieve the desired results, turned to mob elements from Spain last year in order to murder a military helicopter captain who had fled to Ukraine before settling in the Mediterranean.

Officials said that Iran’s decision to use criminal proxies was partly driven by necessity. This reflects the intense scrutiny Western governments place on Iran’s operatives. Zeraati’s attack avoided these Iran-focused defences.

Matt Jukes, assistant commissioner of Scotland Yard and head of counterterrorism police in the United Kingdom, said: “We are not dealing with the usual suspects.” He admitted that Zeraati’s attackers remain at large five months after the stabbing. The assailants have been identified, and their travels to Eastern Europe have been traced. However, they have not yet been arrested. Officials say the suspects are still in Eastern Europe, and other security services are working with British authorities. However, they refuse to elaborate on why the suspects were not arrested.

Jukes said, “We’re dealing with a hostile actor who sees the battlefield without borders and Londoners as legitimate targets as if they were in Iran.” According to British intelligence officials and the MI5, Britain’s domestic spying agency, the Metropolitan Police has tracked 16 plots by the Islamic Republic over the last two years.

The United States faced similar threats. Several of these were detailed in criminal charges that linked biker gangs from Canada and mobs from Eastern Europe with planned assassinations ordered by Iran.

Matthew G. Olsen is the head of the national security division of the Justice Department. He said, “Iran clearly tops the list” for states that seek to kill, abduct, or threaten dissidents, journalists, and others outside of their borders. Olsen stated that other nations, notably China, try to intimidate and repress diaspora communities, but Iran “consistently focuses on actions at [transnational] repression’s extreme end because of its lethal targeting.”

Iran dismissed these accusations as Western misinformation. Iran’s UN mission said that the Islamic Republic of Iran has neither the intention nor the plan of engaging in assassination and abduction operations in the West, or in any other country. These fabrications were concocted by the Zionist regime, Mujahedin-e Khalq, a terrorist group based in Albania, and some Western intelligence services, including those of the United States, to divert attention away from the atrocities perpetrated by the Israeli regime.

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An increase in attacks

Iran’s operations overseas have increased in response to an extended period of political tension