Iran's terror plots and alleged use of hired assassins show it is West's mortal enemy – Struan Stevenson

An Iranian woman walks past a giant poster showing Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, right, and the founder of the Islamic republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (Picture: Atta Kenare/AFP via Getty Images)

UK and EU should follow America’s lead and declare Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps to be a terrorist organisation

On 29 January, Britain imposed sanctions on Iranian officials it said were involved in threats to kill journalists on British soil, and others it said were part of international criminal gangs linked to Iran. The UK Foreign Office said the sanctions, imposed in coordination with the United States, targeted seven individuals and one organisation.

The sanctioned officials are members of the sinister Unit 840 of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), which intelligence services claim was involved in plots to assassinate two television presenters from news channel Iran International in the UK. Foreign Secretary David Cameron said: “The Iranian regime and the criminal gangs who operate on its behalf pose an unacceptable threat to the UK’s security." Assistant Commissioner Matt Jukes, Britain’s head of counter-terrorism policing, told the media earlier in January about Iran’s growing use of criminal proxies. “Why would you do it yourself when you can procure an organised criminal to take the action on your behalf and provide distance and deniability,” he said.

However, the piecemeal sanctioning of a handful of IRGC thugs and the menacing Unit 840 does not go nearly far enough. The very fact that the UK Government has identified the IRGC as being behind the deployment of trained assassins is surely enough to warrant the blacklisting of the entire organisation?

The same applies to the EU. After the Iranian terrorist ‘diplomat’ Assadollah Assadi was caught red-handed in 2018, handing a bomb and €30,000 to three co-conspirators, with instructions to detonate the device at a mass Iranian opposition rally in Paris, he was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment. In his hire car, police found a little red notebook containing the names and addresses of 200 agents he had visited in 11 EU member states.