Bojan Pancevski

Essentially, it can turn anyone into a sort of executor of Iran's agenda.

Quite often, they don't even know who they're working for.

It basically means that a lot of people from all walks of life can be recruited to be part of this kind of criminal network.

Well, basically, it's based on leads they've got in their investigations in several European countries, the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and others.

They've also detected these announcements from an alleged group that claims all these attacks.

And they've come to the conclusion that this group is linked to known Iranian social media propaganda channels.

In some cases, the attacks were filmed or even streamed, and they were immediately linked to these channels that are known to belong to government agencies from Iran.

So they basically believe the group doesn't exist as a group.

It's just a sort of a cover, an online presence for what is being, they believe, organized by Tehran.

Iran has been plotting or executing attacks on opponents, on critics, on dissidents, on Western journalists, writers or politicians for many years now.

So this is not something that's unknown to European law enforcement.

They foiled many such attempts.

Iran, in the past two or three years, they've been recruiting organized crime figures from motorcycle gangs, racketeering gangs, and also people from the refugee community.

Now it seems like they've amplified the use of this method.

They're using people who are not necessarily Iranians, who are not spies or saboteurs, but rather they are criminals or just random people who were hired to do something for money.

And Russia, Iran's greatest ally, has perfected that playbook since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

We've seen a lot of attacks by random people paid by Russia in Europe.

And it seems like now Iran is basically picking up on that way of doing things.

playbook is pretty scary for law enforcement people I talk to.

Essentially, it can turn anyone into a sort of executor of Iran's agenda.