Four Iranians were on Tuesday indicted on charges of plotting to abduct a journalist in New York and smuggle her out of the country to Iran, the US Department of Justice said.
US-based journalist and activist Masih Alinejad, who is of Iranian descent and is an outspoken critic of the Tehran government, confirmed on Twitter that she was the target of the alleged plot.
“I am grateful to the FBI for foiling the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Intelligence Ministry’s plot to kidnap me,” she wrote, with a video clip of her standing by her a window with a police car in the street outside, lights flashing.
Photo: AFP
“This plot was orchestrated under Rouhani,” she added, referring to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, widely seen as a political moderate.
Alinejad founded the My Stealthy Freedom movement, which encourages women to remove their hijabs.
The four men named in the indictment are an Iranian intelligence official and three officers who work under him, all of whom live in Iran, a statement from the department said.
A fifth coconspirator in California is accused of financing the alleged operation.
The department’s indictment said that the intelligence officers had first tried in 2018 to force relatives of their kidnap target, referred to only as Victim-1, to lure her to a third country to be arrested and brought to Iran to be imprisoned.
They then moved to surveiling her and other members of her household in Brooklyn, New York, “on multiple occasions in 2020 and 2021,” the department’s statement said.
The agents hired private investigators to “surveil, photograph and video record” their target, the charge sheet said.
It said that the men researched how to bring Alinejad from the US to Iran.
One of the accused allegedly looked into travel routes from her home to a waterfront neighborhood in Brooklyn, while another was researching a “service offering military-style speedboats for self-operated maritime evacuation out of Manhattan.”
They also examined ways of getting their kidnap victim from New York by sea to Venezuela, which has close ties to Tehran.
The indictment said that in July 2019, the chief of the Iranian Revolutionary Courts said that anyone sending out video attacking the regime, in particular contradicting the law that women must cover their heads, “was committing the crime of cooperating with a hostile foreign government and would be sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment.”
The Iranian network uncovered by the FBI was also scoping out other targets in Canada, the UK and the United Arab Emirates, and had tried to deploy similar methods of surveillance there, the indictment said.
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