Masih Alinejad spoke critically of her native country’s autocracy. Now an Iranian intelligence official and three others have been indicted in New Y

Iranian Operatives Planned to Kidnap a Brooklyn Author, Prosecutors Say

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2021-07-14 02:00:07

Masih Alinejad spoke critically of her native country’s autocracy. Now an Iranian intelligence official and three others have been indicted in New York.

An Iranian American journalist living in Brooklyn was the target of an international kidnapping plot orchestrated by an Iranian intelligence network, federal prosecutors said Tuesday.

In an indictment unsealed in federal court in Manhattan, four Iranians were charged with conspiring to kidnap the journalist and author, Masih Alinejad, who has long been a staunch critic of the Iranian government.

Ms. Alinejad was not identified by prosecutors, but confirmed in an interview that she was the intended target of the plot. Last year, Ms. Alinejad wrote in a newspaper article that Iranian government officials had unleashed a social media campaign calling for her abduction.

The four defendants all live in Iran, the prosecutors said, identifying one of them, Alireza Shavaroghi Farahani, as an Iranian intelligence official and the three others as “Iranian intelligence assets.” A fifth defendant, accused of supporting the plot but not participating in the kidnapping conspiracy, was arrested in California.