Iranian charged with hiring Canadian hitmen to kill exiles in Maryland
Prosecutors named the mastermind of the plot as Iran-based Naji Sharifi Zindashti, 49, accusing him of recruiting a team of gunmen through an encrypted messaging service to travel to Maryland to assassinate the pair. According to court documents, Zindashti spent months concocting the plot with the assistance of Canadian nationals Damion Patrick John Ryan, 43, and Adam Richard Pearson, 29, who were named as co-defendants.
Zindashti offered to pay $370,000 for the murders, according to messages exchanged among the co-defendants between December 2020 and March 2021, as described in court documents. In another message, Pearson said to Ryan: “We gotta erase his head from his torso,” according to the documents.
“Today’s charges show a pattern of Iranian groups trying to murder U.S. residents on U.S. soil,” Assistant Director Suzanne Turner of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division said in a statement Monday. “Mr. Zindashti and his accomplices’ alleged plot is reprehensible, and the FBI will not tolerate such acts against U.S. residents, and we will continue to pursue these individuals until they are brought to the U.S. to face justice.”
Zindashti is based in Iran, the DOJ said; the United States does not have an extradition treaty with Iran. Prosecutors were cooperating with authorities in Canada over Ryan and Pearson, who are currently incarcerated there on unrelated offenses. Federal officials did not specify a potential motive, but they accused Zindashti’s network of previously killing and kidnapping perceived critics of the Iranian government.
The same day the indictment was unsealed, U.S. Treasury Department officials announced a slew of sanctions against Zindashti, whom they accused of targeting Iranian dissidents at the behest of the country’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security. The sanctions prohibit Zindashti and key associates from engaging in any U.S.-linked transactions.
According to court documents, the defendants communicated using the Sky ECC encrypted messaging service. Zindashti enlisted Ryan with an offer to “make some money,” and Ryan in turn recruited Pearson for a “job” in Maryland, the documents say.
Prosecutors alleged that in January 2021, Ryan then exchanged messages with Pearson, who was illegally residing in Minnesota under an assumed name at the time, to discuss the logistics of traveling to Maryland. Pearson said he would “make sure I hit this guy in the head with ATLEAST half the clip,” according to the court documents. Pearson said that he may charge over $100,000 for the job — to which Ryan responded that he would “get u what u want,” the documents say.
According to prosecutors, messages exchanged between Zindashti and Ryan show that the pair agreed on a payment of $350,000, with an additional $20,000 to cover travel expenses.
According to the Justice Department, the maximum penalty for those convicted of federal “murder-for-hire” offenses is 10 years in prison and a fine, with that penalty extending to 20 years when personal injury results and life imprisonment or execution when the plot leads to death.
A Minnesota federal grand jury charged all three men in December with conspiracy to use interstate commerce in the commission of a murder-for-hire plot. Pearson was also charged with two counts related to unlawful possession of a firearm.
“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 Treasury Department said. Iran “increasingly relies on organized criminal groups … to obscure links to the Government of Iran and maintain plausible deniability,” it added.
Officials accused Zindashti’s associates of involvement in the kidnapping of Habib Chaab, an exiled Iranian opposition figure who was lured to Istanbul in 2020, drugged and smuggled back into Iran. Chaab, an Iranian-Swedish dual national, was executed in May 2023 after he was accused in a closed-door trial of masterminding a 2018 attack on a military parade.
The Treasury Department alleged that the Iranian government also “used Zindashti and his men” to carry out the assassination of Masud Vardanjani, a government critic and former Iranian cybersecurity official, in Istanbul in 2019. Zindashti was also behind the murder of two men, including a British-Iranian dissident, in 2017, the department said.
The Iranian government in recent years has been accused of coordinating a string of daring plots to assassinate and abduct expatriate Iranians critical of it.
In 2019, dissident journalist Ruhollah Zam was lured from his home in France to Iraq, taken to Iran and hanged the following year.
In a separate case, Jamshid Sharmahd, a California resident and dual German-Iranian national, was kidnapped during a layover in Dubai and taken to Iran. He was accused of leading a “terrorist” group and sentenced to death following what the Treasury Department called a “sham trial” in April 2023.
On U.S. soil, the Iranian government has been accused of planning to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington in 2011, as well as a plot to kidnap Masih Alinejad, an exiled journalist and outspoken critic of the Iranian government who lives in Brooklyn.
