U.S. Charges Iranian Revolutionary Guards Official in Assassination Plot

The failed plot to kill Masih Alinejad, a human-rights activist, had already led to murder-for-hire charges against members of an Eastern European criminal organization with ties to Iran.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan charged a senior official in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps of Iran and three other men connected to the country’s government with participating in a failed plot to assassinate a human-rights activist in Brooklyn in 2022, according to a new indictment made public on Tuesday.

The plot to kill the activist, Masih Alinejad, who has criticized Iran’s repression of women, was disrupted by the U.S. government and had already led to federal murder-for-hire charges against members of an Eastern European criminal organization with ties to Iran.

The new charges are the first to directly accuse a high-ranking official in the Revolutionary Guards with a role in the plot. The group is Iran’s primary military force, executing its foreign policy across the Middle East and controlling much of the country’s economy.

The official, Ruhollah Bazghandi, is described in the indictment as a brigadier general with the Revolutionary Guards whom the U.S. Treasury Department last year called a counterintelligence official.

The Treasury Department, in imposing sanctions on Mr. Bazghandi, said he had been involved with the detention of foreign prisoners in Iran, as well as in assassination plots against journalists, Israeli citizens and other people deemed enemies of Iran.

Ms. Alinejad, who lived in Brooklyn but who has since moved elsewhere in New York, wrote in a 2020 article that the Iranian government had called for her abduction through a social media campaign.

Ms. Alinejad said Tuesday in an interview that “the Iranian regime always uses criminal gangs to do their dirty jobs beyond their own borders, to get away from punishment, to get away from accountability.”

The new charges, she said, show the direct involvement of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in such plots.

“It is very significant that now we have proof that I.R.G.C. members, the senior members of the Revolutionary Guards, were sitting in Iran and ordering a guy in New York to kill a U.S. citizen,” Ms. Alinejad said.

She added that she was now “more determined to give voice to Iranian people, especially women, who actually face the same killers within their country.”

The charges were announced on the same day that Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken arrived in Israel amid the conflict that has enveloped the region over the past year. He came just hours after the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah, backed by Iran, launched a missile attack at an Israeli military base near Tel Aviv and Israel launched a strike near Lebanon’s largest public hospital.

The indictment was the latest step in the Justice Department’s effort to stop foreign government influence across the United States, including by curtailing intimidation efforts on American soil and disrupting assassination plots. Last week, federal prosecutors charged a man they identified as an Indian intelligence officer with trying to orchestrate an assassination plot against a New York-based Sikh activist.

The three other men named in the indictment filed on Tuesday were Hossein Sedighi, Seyed Mohammad Forouzan and a man identified only by an alias, Haj Taher. Prosecutors described the three as members of an Iranian intelligence network. After an earlier plot to kidnap Ms. Alinejad failed, the indictment says, Mr. Bazghandi and the three men “continued to research, monitor and target” her.

All four men remain at large, prosecutors said.

Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, noting his office’s previous charges against members of the Eastern European criminal organization in the murder plot, said in a statement, “Today, we hold their Iranian masters to account.”

James E. Dennehy, the F.B.I.’s assistant director in charge of the agency’s New York field office, added, “This crime was intended to stop an American from exercising their constitutionally protected right to free speech; to end their life for speaking out publicly against the Iranian regime and its human-rights violations.”

Ms. Alinejad has been a vocal critic of the Iranian government for decades, including launching a campaign against the country’s compulsory hijab laws. In a 2018 opinion piece in The New York Times, she detailed the reasons she said she was forced to flee her homeland in 2009 and how even though she “remained out of reach of the regime,” her family had “taken the brunt.”

“The Intelligence Ministry regularly sends officers to pay visits to my elderly parents,” she wrote. “At one point they offered to arrange a ‘family reunion’ in Turkey. I can only imagine what they had in mind for me.”

In 2021, federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment charging four Iranians, who all lived there, with conspiring to kidnap Ms. Alinejad after luring her to a third country. The goal, according to investigators, was ultimately to bring her to Iran.

Prosecutors said one of the men, Alireza Shavaroghi Farahani, an intelligence official, through his network had hired private investigators to surveil Ms. Alinejad and members of her household. The operation included a live, high-definition video feed depicting her home, according to prosecutors.

The network also researched methods of transporting Ms. Alinejad out of the United States, prosecutors said, including a service offering “military-style speedboats” to transport her out of New York to Venezuela, a country whose “de facto government has friendly relations with Iran.”

When that plot was foiled, an assassination plot was born, according to prosecutors.

About three days after the U.S. government unsealed charges in the kidnapping plot, Mr. Bazghandi watched a YouTube video with a Farsi title that translated to “The Islamic Republic of Iran plans to transfer” Ms. Alinejad to Iran, according to the indictment. In 2022, the indictment says, Mr. Sedighi, Mr. Forouzan and Mr. Taher exchanged “explicit electronic communications about payment for the murder” of Ms. Alinejad.