The US authorities have announced the arrests of two men accused of spying on American soil on behalf of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The men were reportedly arrested on August 9, but information about them was only released on Monday by the United States Department of Justice. In a press release published online, John Demers, Assistant Attorney General for National Security, said the men, identified as Ahmadreza Mohammadi Doostdar, 38, and Majid Ghorbani, 59, were arrested on suspicion of acting on behalf of Iran. Doostdar has dual citizenship, American and Iranian, while Ghorbani is an Iranian citizen living in California. The two men are not diplomats.
According to the US government, the men in question were observed watching over President Trump's political opponents and engaging in other activities that could potentially put Americans at risk.
The press release states that Doostdar carried out surveillance of a Jewish center in Chicago, while Ghorbani participated in meetings and demonstrations organized by Iranian opposition groups operating in the United States. The press release identifies a group such as the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK), a militant faction that has roots in radical Islam and Marxism.
Between 1970 and 1976, the group murdered six American officials in Iran and in 1970 tried to kill the US ambassador to the country. He initially supported the 1979 Islamic revolution, but later withdrew his support, accusing the Ayatollah Khomeini government of "fascism".
It continued its operations in exile, mainly from Iraq, where its armed members were trained by the Palestine Liberation Organization and other Arab leftist groups. Until 2009, the European Union and the United States officially considered the MEK a terrorist organization. But the group's sworn hatred of the government in Iran drew it closer to Washington after the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. In 2006, the US military cooperated openly with MEK forces in Iraq, and in 2012 the group was removed from the US State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations. Today the group enjoys open protection from the EU and the US.
On June 30 this year, Belgian authorities arrested a married Belgian couple of Iranian descent carrying explosives and a detonator. The following day, July 1, German police arrested an Iranian diplomat stationed in the Iranian embassy in Vienna, Austria, while a fourth person was arrested by authorities in France. All four individuals were accused of planning a plot, then thwarted, over a bombing at the annual conference of the MEK-affiliated National Council of Resistance to Iran (NCRI) which took place June 30 in Paris. It is not known whether the arrests in Europe are in any way connected with the cases of the two men detained in the United States.