Sharifi-Zindashti, Naji Ibrahim
"Today, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and the United Kingdom are taking joint action against a network of individuals that targeted Iranian dissidents and opposition activists for assassination at the direction of the Iranian regime. The network is led by Iranian narcotics trafficker Naji Ibrahim Sharifi-Zindashti (Zindashti) and operates at the behest of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). Zindashti’s network has carried out numerous acts of transnational repression including assassinations and kidnappings across multiple jurisdictions in an attempt to silence the Iranian regime’s perceived critics. The network has also plotted operations in the United States... Iran-based narco-trafficker Zindashti and his network are intertwined with Iran’s transnational repression efforts to silence and intimidate dissidents, former insiders, and other perceived opponents by carrying out assassinations and kidnappings under the direction of the MOIS across multiple continents. Iranian security forces protect Zindashti and his criminal empire, enabling Zindashti to thrive in the country’s drug market and live a life of luxury while his network exports the regime’s repression, carrying out heinous operations on the government’s behalf. Zindashti’s network has been linked to murders in several countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Canada, and Türkiye... In 2021, Zindashti’s network recruited Canadian national and British Columbia-based Hells Angels Outlaw Motorcycle Group member Damion Patrick John Ryan (Ryan) to assassinate individuals in the United States who fled Iran... Zindashti has previously cooperated with the MOIS to target regime dissidents. In 2020, as part of an MOIS-sponsored operation, Habib Chaab, a leader of the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahvaz (ASMLA), was abducted in Türkiye by Zindashti’s men. Chaab was then smuggled into Iran where he was imprisoned, tortured, forced to confess under duress, and ultimately convicted of “corruption on earth” following a trial which lacked fair-trial guarantees. Iranian authorities executed Chaab in May 2023. In 2019, the MOIS used Zindashti and his men to assassinate former Iranian cybersecurity official turned regime critic Mas’ud Vardanjani (Vardanjani) in Istanbul. Vardanjani, who was outspoken in his condemnation of the Iranian regime, publicly disclosed documents exposing financial corruption and assassinations by the regime via his Telegram channel... Nominally Zindashti’s gardener, Abdulvahap Kocak, served as a hitman who has been implicated in multiple assassinations ordered by Zindashti, including the killing of a rival drug trafficker’s attorney in Istanbul in 2017... Also in 2017, British-Iranian dissident Saeed Karimian (Karimian), who owned GEM TV and used it to broadcast content critical of the Iranian regime, was shot and killed in Istanbul along with Kuwaiti businessman Muhammad Mer Almuntari. Zindashti was later discovered to be behind the double murder."1
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