Tehran plans to assassinate influential Jews world over if Israel attacks, claims French journalist
Iran has planned attacks on select Jewish diaspora as a response to an eventuality of an Israeli attack, a French journalist who has worked in the country has claimed.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps plotted to “identify all the prominent NGOs run by Jews, who was doing what in each business sector, the important rabbis,” Catherine Perez-Shakdam told the Jewish Chronicle.
Shakdam has met both Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Ebrahim Raisi, and used to write for to pro-Iran media outlets in the past.
She learnt about the plot at a meeting, which accessed through filmmaker Nader Talebzadeh, who died in April last year.
Talebzadeh, who was under US sanctions, was a member of the New Horizon organisation, which set up support events for the IRGC.
They wanted “wanted to figure out their influence and where they lived with their families in order to target them,” she said.
The people in these meetings didn’t know that Shakdam herself was Jewish, she said.
The IRGC has been repeatedly accused of assassination attempts on opponents, even against foreign nationals outside Iran.
The British intelligence has had a vigilant eye on such plots in the UK.
Last year in November, MI5 Director General said that Iran had “ambitions to kidnap or even kill British or UK-based individuals perceived as enemies of the regime”.
He revealed that the British intelligence had stopped at least 10 attempts in 2022.
