US charges Iranians with plotting to abduct reporter

Four Iranian nationals were indicted on Tuesday on charges of plotting to abduct a journalist in New York and smuggle her out of the country to Iran, the Justice Department 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 Iran’s Intelligence Ministry’s plot to kidnap me,” she said, with a video clip of her standing by her a window with a police car in the street outside, lights flashing.

“This plot was orchestrated under Rouhani,” she said, referring to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, widely seen as a political moderate.

The four men named in the indictment are an Iranian intelligence official and three officers who work under him, according to the Justice Department.

It said they all live in Iran.

A fifth co-conspirator in California is accused of financing the alleged operation.

According to the Justice Department indictment, 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.

They then moved to surveilling the victim and other members of her household in Brooklyn, New York “on multiple occasions in 2020 and 2021”, the Justice Department said.

It alleged that the men researched how to bring the journalist from the United States to Iran.

One of the accused allegedly looked into travel routes from her home to a waterfront neighbourhood 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 with Tehran.

The four agents were identified as Alireza Shavaroghi Farahani, Mahmoud Khazein, Kiya Sadeghi and Omid Noori.

A fifth Iranian residing in California, Niloufar Bahadorifar, was suspected of having helped in financing the plot.