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The Weekly Standard Blog October 18, 2011
Americans were stunned on October 11 when the Justice Department unsealed its complaint against Mansour Arbabsiar, a 56-year-old used-car dealer from Corpus Christi now in federal custody, and Ali Gholam Shakuri, a member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force. Shakuri remains inside Iran. The pair have been charged with conspiring to kill the Saudi ambassador in Washington, Adel Al-Jubeir.
As disclosed by the Treasury Department, the plot was coordinated by Arbabsiar’s cousin, Abdul Reza Shahlai, a top Quds Force functionary whom the Treasury designated in 2008 as one of several “individuals and entities fueling violence in Iraq.” Shahlai was described then as the planner of “special group attacks” by the Mahdi Army, headed by Moktada Al-Sadr, against Coalition forces on the territory of Iran’s western neighbor.
The Arbabsiar affair is not the first terrorism case involving an Iranian agent in the United States. In 1980, the year after the Iranian Revolution, foreign-directed Islamist homicide on American soil was inaugurated in Bethesda, Md., when Ali Akbar Tabatabai, 50, was killed at his home. A former press attache of the Iranian Embassy in Washington, under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Tabatabai was shot dead by David Belfield, an African-American Muslim.
Continue reading Iranian Murders in the West by Stephen Schwartz
Folksmagazine [India] October 16, 2011
Legal charges were entered in the U.S. last week against an Iranian-American dual citizen, Mansour Arbabsiar, 56, who had resided in Texas, and an Iranian living in his native country and thus beyond American judicial apprehension, Ali Gholam Shakuri. The two men are accused of conspiring to murder Adel Al-Jubeir, the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States, after first scheming to kidnap the diplomat. According to the legal filing provided by the U.S. federal authorities, Shakuri is a member of the Qods Force, a special-operations component of the Tehran clerical regime’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The indictment, along with American media reportage, discloses that the plan to kill Al-Jubeir was a “sting” by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Arbabsiar believed that he was dealing with a representative of a fearsome Mexican drug cartel, the “Zetas,” in attempting to procure the abduction or slaying of Al-Jubeir in Washington, DC. The interlocutor for the murder contract, ostensibly hiring Mexican gangsters, was a paid U.S. confidential source previously arrested for narcotics offenses and control\led by the DEA. U.S. agents monitored Arbabsiar’s travel to Mexico, and transcribed conversations, between him and the purported gang representative, that were recorded by the U.S. government’s agent in June and July 2011.
Continue reading Iranian Regime’s Trail of Terror by Stephen Schwartz
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