Islamic Republic's Biker Gang: Iran Taps Hell's Angels to Kill Dissidents

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The United States Treasury Department announced that the United States and Britain imposed sanctions on a network of people who targeted Iranian dissidents, defectors, and opposition figures for assassination upon Iran’s orders, including members of a notorious outlaw motorcycle gang.

The US Treasury released a statement on January 30th, accusing the network of being directed by Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security and putting sanctions on 11 individuals connected to it, including Naji Ibrahim Sharifi-Zindashti, an Iranian narcotics trafficker who was said to be its leader.

The Treasury also said Zindashti’s network carried out assassinations and kidnappings across several jurisdictions, intending to silence the Islamic Republic’s real and perceived critics. 

“The Iranian regime’s continued efforts to target dissidents and activists demonstrate the regime’s deep insecurity and attempt to expand Iran’s domestic repression internationally,” Brian Nelson, the Treasury’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said. 

This means that any assets of those targeted in the United States are frozen, and Americans are prohibited from making deals with them. 

When the Treasury announced the names of those targeted for sanctions, the department also said that in 2021, the network recruited Damion Patrick John Ryan, a Canadian national and a member of the Hells Angels Outlaw Motorcycle Group, to assassinate individuals in the United States who fled Iran.

The Treasury also said Ryan recruited his fellow Hells Angels member Adam Richard Pearson for the assassination attempts. Both Ryan and Pearson are currently in prison abroad for unrelated criminal charges.

Zindashti, Pearson, and Ryan were accused of conspiring to use interstate commerce in the commission of a murder-for-hire plot, according to the US Department of Justice. It said the three conspired with each other in a plot to murder two residents of the state of Maryland who fled to the United States after one of them defected from Iran.

They also targeted other dissidents such as Mas’ud Vardanjani, a former Iranian cybersecurity official turned critic, and Saeed Karimian, a British-Iranian dissident. 

The British government also imposed sanctions on Iranian officials it said were involved in threats to kill journalists on British soil, and others, it said, were part of international criminal gangs linked to Iran.

The British Foreign Office said the sanctions targeted one organization and seven individuals. The sanctioned Iranian officials are part of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Unit 840, which an ITV investigation said was involved in planning to assassinate two television presenters from the news channel Iran International in the United Kingdom.

This would not be the first time Hells Angels, one of the biggest and most notorious outlaw motorcycle gangs in the world, and its members were accused of being recruited by the Iranian regime to silence critics and carry out attacks across the globe.

In December 2022, the German police accused Ramin Yektaparast, a Hells Angels boss, of organizing terror attacks against two synagogues in Germany that took place in mid-November, when four bullet holes were discovered in the doorway of a former rabbis’ residence in Essen and a Molotov cocktail was thrown at a school near a synagogue in Bochum.

Yektaparast is also being pursued with an international arrest warrant for the murder of a fellow bike gang member in 2014, where he murdered a member he allegedly believed to be a police mole, before cutting his body into pieces, encasing them in cement and throwing them in the Rhine river. 

He fled to Tehran in September 2021, where authorities said the IRGC tasked the biker boss to organize and carry out attacks against Jewish buildings in Germany.

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