US Indicts Three Iran-Backed Operatives Over Attacks on Jews and RAF Fairford Plot

The U.S. Justice Department on November 10 unsealed an eight-count superseding indictment in Manhattan federal court charging three men with supporting Kata’ib Hezbollah and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). It accuses them of roles in nearly 20 attacks and attempted attacks in Europe and the United States and in a September 2026 plot at RAF Fairford, a British air base housing U.S. forces. The defendants are Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood al-Saadi, a dual Iranian-Iraqi national; Mohsen Mohajeri, an Iranian the department calls an IRGC operative; and Mohammad Ali al-Hassani, an Iraqi national. According to the indictment, 18 attacks in Europe in the spring of 2026 were claimed under the name Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiya (HAYI), which the department describes as a front for Kata’ib Hezbollah. Seven were in Britain, including a near-fatal stabbing of two Jewish men in London. In a video recorded in Iraq on April 6, al-Hassani allegedly told Mohajeri, “we need to get focused on London,” about a week before six attacks there. Al-Saadi, charged in May over those attacks and an attempt to bomb a synagogue in New York, is accused of passing coded messages from jail through relatives. Prosecutors say al-Hassani, directing from Iran, paid associates in Britain to film the base’s perimeter in August and in September to buy vans, barrels of fuel and metal objects usable as shrapnel. On September 26 three vans bearing fuel-delivery decals headed for the base; at least two were turned back at a security roadblock, and British authorities arrested the occupants early on September 27. “The threat presented by Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups to America and our allies is not hypothetical,” said Jamie McDonald, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. All three are presumed innocent. On October 12, the foreign ministers of 35 countries, including the United States and Britain, and the EU’s foreign policy chief recognised Britain’s attribution of Iranian involvement in the Fairford incident and tied it to HAYI’s campaign against Jewish communities. Iran’s Foreign Ministry rejected Britain’s allegations that day as a false-flag operation and demanded evidence.