UK Security Minister Tom Tugendhat has confirmed testimony from a French Jewish journalist that Iran has been “mapping” Jewish diaspora communities to be attacked by kill squads, stating that the Iranian regime has gathered intelligence on British Jews and targeted them for assassination.
Speaking to parliament about the threat Iran poses to British journalists critical of the regime, he also said: “Between 2020 and 2022, Iran tried to collect intelligence on UK-based Israeli and Jewish individuals… We believe this information was a preparation for future lethal operations.”
He also said: “We know that the Iranian intelligence services work with organized criminal gangs, and I can assure the house and the public that we will go after anyone working with them.”
Journalist Catherine Perez-Shakdam told the Jewish Chronicle last week that she was present during a high-level meeting in Tehran in which a plot was discussed that would involve Iranian kill teams positioned in Jewish communities activated in the event of a war between Israel and Iran, so that “the diaspora would have a very nasty surprise.”
Perez-Shakdam, who is a Middle East analyst at the Henry Jackson Society think tank, received the info through a senior contact, the late Nader Talebzadeh, a man she referred to as “Iran’s Dr. Goebbels,” during a meeting he organized in Iran about a plan to “to identify all the prominent NGOs run by Jews, who was doing what in each business sector, the important rabbis. They wanted to figure out their influence and where they lived with their families in order to target them.”