World
UK police charge man over suspected collaborating with Iranian intelligence
LONDON — British police said on Friday they had charged a 39-year-old man on suspicion of assisting Iran’s intelligence service, the latest in a series of incidents involving Tehran and offenses covered under the UK’s National Security laws.
Police said the suspect, Vahid Aberi, from Liverpool, in northern England, was taken to a police station in central England, and that searches had been carried out at addresses in nearby Birmingham and Liverpool.
UK security officials have repeatedly warned that Iran has sought to use criminal proxies to carry out hostile activity in the country. Since the beginning of the US-Israeli war with Iran in late February, there have been a number of antisemitic attacks in Britain linked to Iran.
Seeking to use new powers designed to stop the use of state-sponsored proxies, earlier this week the government said it was banning the Iran-backed Islamic Movement of the Companions of the Right, or IMCR, also known as Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia.
The group sprang up online earlier this year and said online that it was responsible for a string of arson attacks on Jewish sites in London in recent months, including fires at synagogues and the torching of Jewish charity ambulances, as well as a Persian-language media organization critical of Iran’s government. No one was injured in the blazes.
Those incidents have come amid a broader spike in antisemitism in the UK, including an incident in which two Jews were stabbed in the heavily Jewish London neighborhood of Golders Green earlier this year.
The UK also banned Iran’s powerful paramilitary Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a threat to national security. The IRGC is already subject to British sanctions.
Aberi will appear in court in London later on Friday. On the investigation, police said they had not identified any direct threat to any community or individual, but said they have had to intervene more frequently to disrupt suspected activity by foreign intelligence services.
“We have seen a significant and sustained increase in the tempo of our work in national security investigations in recent years,” Helen Flanagan, head of counter terrorism policing in London, said in a statement.
Last week, Britain summoned Iran’s most senior diplomat over the stabbing of an Iranian journalist in London, for which two Romanians were convicted.
In response to being called a threat to Britain, Iran’s embassy in London has previously said it rejected the “unfounded, politically motivated and hostile allegations.”
Agencies and Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.
