The US has charged an Iranian drug trafficker with intelligence ties to Tehran, a Canadian Hells Angel and another Canadian man in an alleged plot to carry out assassinations in the US.
According to statements by the justice department and the Treasury on Monday, the alleged drug smuggler Naji Sharifi Zindashti, ran an assassination ring on behalf of Iran’s ministry of intelligence and security (Mois).
The indictment against Zindashti, 49, and an unnamed co-conspirator from Iran said they were in contact with Damion Ryan, 43, a “full-patch member of the outlaw Hells Angels Motorcycle Club” using an encrypted communication platform, SkyECC, in December 2020 and early 2021.
Zindashti said Ryan should assemble a team to carry out a job in the US, the murder of an Iranian defector and a female companion living in Maryland. Ryan said it was “challenging” for him to do it, but he might know someone who was capable. Ryan then contacted another Canadian, Adam Pearson, who allegedly told him he had people he trusted to do it and that “shooting is probably easiest thing for them”.
Ryan is said to have suggested to Pearson he would need two or three other people. Pearson then said he would need $100,000, to which Ryan allegedly replied that Pearson would get as much money as he wanted but the job needed “to be over kill lol”. Pearson said he would tell his recruited team members to “to shoot [the victims] in the head a lot [to] make [an] example” adding “we gotta erase his head from his torso”.
In early February 2021 Zindashti told Ryan his organisation was ready to move forward with the plot and they agreed a fee of $350,000, plus $20,000 in travel expenses.
Prosecutors say Ryan and Pearson are currently imprisoned in Canada on unrelated charges.
“To those in Iran who plot murders on US soil and the criminal actors who work with them, let today’s charges send a clear message: the Department of Justice will pursue you as long as it takes – and wherever you are – and deliver justice,” the assistant attorney general Matthew Olsen, of the justice department’s national security division, said.
The US and UK governments announced joint measures against Zindashti’s ring on Monday.
“Zindashti’s network has carried out numerous acts of transnational repression including assassinations and kidnappings across multiple jurisdictions in an attempt to silence the Iranian regime’s perceived critics,” a Treasury statement said.
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It is not the first time Iran has been accused of working together with Hells Angels. The German police blamed a series of attacks on synagogues in late 2022 on Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps which they said had organised the attacks through a German-Iranian biker gang boss, Ramin Yektaparast.
Yektaparast had been based in Tehran since fleeing there after the murder and dismemberment of a suspected informer in 2014, in a case dubbed the “Rocker-Torso Murder” in the German media.
US officials have previously charged three suspects over a separate alleged plot to kill an Iranian-American journalist in New York City, and also brought charges over failed plot – also allegedly linked to Iran – to assassinate John Bolton, the former Trump administration national security adviser.
