2 Iran agents held for spying in US

washington — The US has charged two alleged agents of Iran, accusing them of conducting covert surveillance of Israeli and Jewish facilities in the United States and collecting intelligence on Americans linked to a political organisation that wants to see the current Iranian government overthrown.

Earlier this week, Ahmadreza Doostdar, 38, a dual US-Iranian citizen born in Long Beach, California, and Majid Ghorbani, 59, who has lived and worked in Costa Mesa, California, since he arrived in the United States in the mid1990s, were charged with acting as illegal agents for Tehran. Ghorbani, who denies the charges, became a legal permanent resident of the United States in 2015.

According to a criminal complaint filed in US District Court in Washington, Doostdar allegedly conducted surveillance in July 2017 on Rohr Chabad House, a Jewish student centre at the University of Chicago in Hyde Park. The surveillance included security features around the centre.

Jonathan Greenblatt, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, applauded the arrests and thanked the FBI for “disrupting the alleged intelligence gathering efforts of Iran, a nation with a long record of involvement in, and support for, terror attacks against Jewish and Israeli institutions”.

Most of the spying detailed in the court documents, however, focused on the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, a group that is outlawed in Iran and was listed as a terrorist organization by the State Department until 2012.

Despite deep ideological differences, the MEK were partners with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in the 1979 revolution that toppled the US-backed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

Following the revolution, the MEK quickly fell out with Khomeini and launched an armed revolt against Khomeini’s new theocracy. The group advocates for the overthrow of the current Iranian government. —