US sanctions Iranian intelligence officials over speedboat kidnap plot

The US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (‘OFAC) says it has ‘designated four Iranian intelligence operatives who targeted a U.S. citizen in the United States and Iranian dissidents in other countries as part of a wide-ranging campaign to silence critics of the Iranian government.’

It said that senior Iranian intelligence official, Alireza Shahvaroghi Farahani ‘led a network that plotted the kidnapping of a U.S. journalist and human rights activist, a failed plot that led to the indictment of members of the network in late July,’ and that ‘consistent with the well-documented role of the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (“MOIS”) in domestic repression, this operation demonstrates the pernicious role of Iran’s intelligence apparatus in targeting Iranians abroad, to include brazen attempts to return dissidents to Iran.’

In July, WorldECR reported on a US indictment against Farahani and others for an alleged plot to kidnap a US-Iranian rights campaigner and journalist from New York, using a ‘military style speedboat’.

OFAC said that the action was taken ‘pursuant to Executive Order (E.O.) 13553. MOIS was previously designated pursuant to E.O. 13553 in 2012 for being responsible for, or complicit in, the commission of serious human rights abuses against Iranian people since June 12, 2009. MOIS has played a key role in the Iranian government’s brutal human rights abuses against Iranians. Iranian repression, often carried out at the hands of MOIS, has also stretched beyond Iran’s borders, with a string of similar plots in Europe and elsewhere.’

https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0343

https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/recent-actions/20210903