Targeting Dissidents Abroad
December 7, 1979: Months after Ruhollah Khomeini founded the Islamic Republic of Iran following a revolution, an assassin shot and killed the former Shah’s nephew Shahriar Shafiq outside his home in Paris.
July 13, 1989: Iranian officials shot and killed the leader of the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran, Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou. The Iranian Kurdish leader was killed by three bullets fired at very close range along with his party comrade Abdullah Ghaderi Azar and Fadhil Rassoul, an Iraqi professor who was the mediator.
April 24, 1990: Kazem Rajavi, a prominent Iranian academic and opposition figure, was shot dead in his car in the village of Coppet, near Geneva, on April 24, 1990. Rajavi, was the spokesperson for the Mojahedin e-Khaleq (MEK) exiled group at the time before joining the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI). A Swiss judge in 2006 issued an arrest warrant for Ali Fallahian, Iran’s intelligence minister from 1989 to 1997, in connection to the assassination of Rajavi.
August 6, 1991: Iranian intelligence agents assassinated former Iranian Prime Minister Shapour Bakhtiar at his home near Paris. Bakhtiar was an opponent of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, but was promoted to be prime minister in a last desperate attempt by the then Iranian leader to save his monarchy. Bakhtiar’s liberal Westernism did not go down well and he resigned after just five weeks in office. He fled the country after the 1979 Iranian revolution and lived in exile in Paris until his murder.
July 24, 1992: The UK Foreign Office in 1992 ordered three Iranians to leave the country amid allegations they were connected in a plot to assassinate Indian-born British American novelist and essayist Salman Rushdie. Three years earlier in 1989, then-Supreme Leader Khomeini issued a fatwa, or religious edict, that called on Muslims to the kill Rusdhie after his book “The Satanic Verses” was condemned as blasphemous.
August 8, 1992: Fereydoun Farrokhzad, a celebrated singer and artist living in Germany was found beaten to death in his apartment in the German city of Bonn. Prior to his death, Farrokhzad was involved in producing an opposition radio program and was critical of the Iranian Revolution and the regime.
September 17, 1992: “The Mykonos Restaurant Murders” became the sight of the gruesome assassination of three Iranian-Kurdish leaders allegedly conducted by Iranian agents. According to Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejad, officials of Iran lured members of Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), under the pretext of negotiations who then fired indiscriminately, killing the dissidents.
February 20, 1996: Zahra Rajabi, a senior member of the MEK stationed in Turkey was shot to death in her Istanbul apartment alongside one of her bodyguards.
December 15, 2015: Mohammad Reza Kolahi Samadi, a member of the MEK, was assassinated via a shot in the head in front of his house in Almere, the Netherlands. Kolahi Samadi had entered the country as a refugee under the false identity of Ali Motamed. Iran had sentenced Samadi to death in absentia for his connection to the 1981 bombing of the Islamic Republican Party’s headquarters in Tehran, which killed dozens of Iranian officials.
November 8, 2017: Ahmad Mola Nissi, founder of the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz (ASMLA) opposition group, was shot outside of his house in The Hague. Dutch intelligence accused Iran of hiring a middleman to carry out the assassination and linked him to the killing and Kolahi Samadi in 2015.
June 30, 2018: A rally of the Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) attended by high-profile former US, European and Arab officials was the target of a bomb plot. Belgian prosecutors charged Vienna-based Iranian diplomat Assadolah Assadi in October 2018 and three others with planning the attack.
October 14, 2019: France-based Iranian dissident journalist Ruhollah Zam was captured and taken to Iran after being lured to Iraq. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said at the time they had “trapped” Zam in a “complex operation using intelligence deception.” Iran executed Zam in December 2020.
November 14, 2019: Iranian dissident Masoud Molavi Vardanjani was shot dead while walking on a street in Istanbul. Turkish officials officially accused two intelligence officers at Iran's consulate in Turkey of instigating the killing.
August 2020: Iran said it captured US-based opposition figure Jamshid Sharmahd. Details of his detention and subsequent travel to Iran, where he is currently held in prison, remain a mystery.
November 2020: Iranian media report the arrest of Sweden-based Iranian Arab opposition figure Habib Chaab, also known as Habib Eseywed. Chaab, who comes from Iran’s Ahwazi Arab ethnic minority group, is believed to have been kidnapped by Iranian intelligence agents in Turkey and taken to Iran from there.
On 01 June 2023, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) was designating members and affiliates of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its external operations arm, the IRGC-Qods Force (IRGC-QF), who participated in a series of terrorist plots including assassination plots targeting former United States government officials, dual U.S. and Iranian nationals, and Iranian dissidents. This action targets three Iran- and Türkiye-based individuals and a company affiliated with the IRGC-QF.
IRGC-QF official Mohammad Reza Ansari (Ansari), a longtime member of the group, had supported the IRGC-QF’s operations in Syria. Ansari was a member of an IRGC-QF external operations unit tasked with undertaking covert operations abroad, including planning and conducting intelligence and lethal operations against Iranian dissidents and other non-Iranian nationals in the United States, the Middle East, Europe, and Africa. Ansari, with the support of Shahram Poursafi (Poursafi), an Iranian national, planned and attempted to assassinate two former U.S. government officials. The Department of Justice indicted Poursafi on August 10, 2022, for providing and attempting to provide material support to a transnational murder plot. Poursafi had also been involved in IRGC-QF operational planning and surveillance operations in the Caucasus region.
Mohammad Reza Ansari and Shahram Poursafi were designated pursuant to E.O. 13224, as amended, for having acted for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, the IRGC-QF. Hossein Hafez Amini (Amini), a dual Iranian and Turkish national based in Türkiye, was an associate of the IRGC-QF operating as part of a network in Türkiye. Amini uses his connections in the aviation industry and his Türkiye-based airline, Rey Havacilik Ithalat Ihracat Sanayi Ve Ticaret Anonim Sirketi (Rey Airlines), to assist the IRGC-QF’s covert operations, including kidnapping and assassination plots targeting Iranian regime dissidents in Türkiye. Additionally, Amini leveraged his Türkiye-based network to support the IRGC-QF through aircraft charters and smuggling operations. Amini and Rey Airlines also previously transferred aircraft to Iran’s Pouya Air, an IRGC-affiliated Iranian airline designated since March 2012 pursuant to E.O. 13224 for acting for or on behalf of the IRGC-QF.
Hossein Hafez Amini was designated pursuant to E.O. 13224, as amended, for having materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for, or goods or services to or in support of, the IRGC-QF. Rey Airlines was being designated pursuant to E.O. 13224, as amended, for being owned, controlled, or directed by, directly or indirectly, Hossein Hafez Amini.
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