Tensions between Iran and Israel have escalated dangerously in recent weeks, culminating of course in Tehran’s recent attack on Tel Aviv with 200 ballistic missiles.
According to a detailed Reuters investigation, however, based on court documents and public statements by officials, there is evidence of dozens of attempted assassinations, kidnappings and terrorist attacks in Western countries in recent years linked to Iran.
As the relevant publication states, since 2020 at least 33 such attacks have been recorded in European countries and the USA, for which either the local or the Israeli authorities claim that Iranian agents are involved or that there is some other kind of connection with the Islamic country. Targets include Israeli citizens, Jewish organizations, as well as Iranian dissidents and figures opposed to the Tehran regime.
One of these cases concerns an attack plan in Athens that targeted the building that houses the Chabad Jewish center and a kosher restaurant in Psirri. According to evidence uncovered by Greek authorities and cited by Reuters, Syed Fakhar Abbas, a Pakistani living in Iran, had recruited another Pakistani, Syed Irtaz Haider, who resided in Greece, to carry out the attack on the building. .
Abbas told his associate that he was working for an organization that would pay around 15,000 euros per murder.
In a WhatsApp message exchange in January 2023, detailed in the documents cited by the agency, the two men discussed whether to use explosives or arson in the attack. Abbas emphasized the need to provide evidence of “casualties” after the strike. “There are secret services” involved, he said, without naming names. “Do the job in a way that leaves no room for complaints.”
The documents cited in the Reuters investigation include hundreds of pages of evidence gathered during the Greek authorities’ investigation, including witness statements and WhatsApp conversations. They show how Abbas was preparing his liaison, a fellow Pakistani named Syed Irtaza Haider, for the attack amid general conversations about their lives back home.
Greek authorities arrested Haider and another Pakistani last year, and said police had helped dismantle a foreign-led terror network aimed at causing “human casualties”. The two men face terrorism-related charges but deny any wrongdoing.
Haider, who was released pending trial on parole, says he is innocent. In an interview, the 28-year-old told Reuters that he had sent Abbas photos of that building but deliberately delayed carrying out any attack, hoping to get paid without harming anyone. “It was just words,” he said characteristically. His lawyer, Zacharias Kesses, told the agency that Haider “never actually participated” in illegal activity.
The alleged mastermind of the planned attack, Abbas, also faces terrorism-related charges. He is wanted in his native Pakistan on suspicion of murder, a Pakistani police official said. To this day he remains free.
Although Greek police declined to speak to Reuters about the case, Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, which assisted the Greek investigation, said the planned attack was orchestrated by Iran, as part of a multinational network based in the Islamic Democracy. The Israeli government declined to comment on the case or other Mossad activities.
Iran denies the Mossad’s claim. However, the operational techniques fit patterns seen in other cases of what appear to be Iranian conspiracies. These patterns relate to the type of target – Israeli or Jewish civilians – and the choice of non-Iranian contract killers. At least two other cases investigated by Reuters allegedly involved Pakistani nationals. At least six of the plots documented by Reuters in Europe since 2020 had Israeli or Jewish targets.
The agency’s report details how communication began between Abbas, who was in Iran, and Haider, who was living in Greece as an undocumented immigrant. Haider told Reuters that the two knew each other from their hometowns. Both hail from the same city of Alipur in the Punjab province of eastern Pakistan. Both are Shia Muslims.
Haider studied engineering in Pakistan and arrived in Greece in 2019, he told Reuters. He settled in Zakynthos where he lived in an apartment building with other Pakistani nationals and occasionally worked in olive groves or wherever else he could find a day job.
Abbas also left his home country where he is wanted for organizing a kidnapping and murder in October 2021, according to a local police official working in Punjab province.
Abbas, a father of two, drove into Iran in February 2022 and has not returned since. Haider’s recruitment began after Abbas arrived in Iran. By April 2022, the two were communicating via WhatsApp, according to Haider’s statement to investigators and messages detailed in legal documents.
In a WhatsApp message exchange in November 2022, the two men discussed targets and methods of deadly attacks. Abbas told Haider to stress to anyone else he managed to recruit what the group was willing to pay: “The pay per head is five million rupees” – about €16,000 at the time.
The men often discussed money. Haider was pressuring Abbas to send money, according to the WhatsApp conversations. Abbas complained in December 2022 that he could not pay his rent and had to borrow cash. “When the job is done, we won’t need money again for the rest of our lives,” Abbas wrote to Haider that same month.
A staged murder
As 2022 drew to a close, Abbas pressed Haider to send photos of Chabad in Athens, a two-story building that houses the Jewish center, which has a prayer hall and a kosher restaurant.
Hyder enlisted the help of the third suspect to provide him with photos and videos of the building in December 2022, the man testified to the investigator. The third suspect also told authorities he did not know the building was a Jewish center. The third man said it was only later that Haider conveyed Abbas’s offer to pay for the killings, which he immediately refused.
In early January 2023, Haider traveled to Athens and recorded video of the Chabad of Athens and the surrounding area, he testified. Forwarding the material to Abbas, he described the area as full of shops and tourists. Abbas responded by saying “good job”.
Their methods were at times amateurish. Haider staged a fake assassination in an attempt to fool Abbas and his bosses. While in Athens, Haider convinced a man of Nepali origin to play the role of the victim in a mock execution, promising to pay him 2,500 euros, according to the Nepalese man’s testimony included in the documents. Haider dressed him in clothes stained with the blood of a slaughtered goat, then told him to lie on the floor and pretend to be dead so he could videotape him. Haider told the inquest that he staged the stunt because Abbas was pressuring him to kill people.
By the second week of January 2023, Abbas and Haider were focused on the Chabad of Athens restaurant, investigators allege in the documents. Abbas suggested arson. “Whatever you can, do it quickly, I won’t be given much time,” Abbas wrote on January 9. “It will, I promise,” Hyder replied.
The Greek authorities put an end to their plans within the next few weeks. Acting on a tip that reached them anonymously, police officers searched Haider’s apartment and arrested him for possession of forged identity documents. Prosecutors subsequently filed terrorism charges. In his testimony after his arrest, Haider described the group into which Abbas recruited him as a large organization based in Iran.
As he awaits trial, Haider says he works two jobs in Zakynthos – as a restaurant employee and as a security guard. He has trouble sleeping. He faces a prison sentence in Greece, but says that even if he is eventually acquitted, he can never return to his home country for fear of retribution from Abbas or his circle. “I’m scared because I don’t know what will happen here, and I can’t go back to Pakistan,” he says.
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