Iranian Regime Working Hand-in-Hand With Organized Crime, Spanish Politician Says

Co-founder of Spain's Vox Party, Alejo Vidal-Quadras, shows the point of exit of the bullet, as he talks on the assassination attempt he suffered in November 2023, in Madrid on Feb. 23, 2024. Thomas Coex/AFP via Getty Images

A Spanish politician and campaigner against the Iranian regime who survived an assassination attempt a year ago has told an online conference that Iran is operating in alliance with organized crime.

Alejo Vidal-Quadras, 79, was shot at point-blank range in the Spanish capital of Madrid on Nov. 9, 2023, but miraculously survived.

He said the Iranian regime is working with the Netherlands-based Mocro Maffia (Moroccan mafia) gang and other organized crime syndicates as it targets dissidents and European nationals.

Vidal-Quadras, a former member of the European Parliament (MEP) and co-founder of the Vox Party, is the president of the International Committee in Search of Justice (ISJ), which was set up in 2008 to “seek justice for the Iranian democratic opposition.”

The ISJ works closely with the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), an umbrella organization that includes the main Iranian opposition groups.

On Nov. 8, the Justice Department unsealed documents alleging that three men were involved in a murder-for-hire network orchestrated by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and targeting President-elect Donald Trump.

Speaking on the same day at an online conference, Vidal-Quadras said the Iranian regime and the Mocro Maffia appeared to have worked together on his attempted assassination.

The Mocro Maffia got its name because most of its founding members were of Moroccan origin.

In 2019, the group murdered Dutch lawyer Derk Wiersum, and in July 2021, it also gunned down TV journalist Peter de Vries. Both killings took place in Amsterdam.

The Mocro Maffia’s leader, Ridouan Taghi, was jailed for life in February, after a six-year trial held in a special high-security courtroom in the Netherlands.

“Seven people of different nationalities have been arrested in relation to my attempted assassination,” Vidal-Quadras said, noting that the man who allegedly shot him is Mehrez Ayari, a 38-year-old French national of Tunisian origin, who was arrested in June in the Dutch city of Haarlem.

“He was arrested as he was about to kill an Iranian dissident living in the Netherlands.”

He called for a more “robust” policy against the Islamic regime, including the designation by the EU and Britain of the IRGC as a terrorist group and the “enforcement and expansion of international sanctions.”

“The integration of these elements into a cohesive strategy will not only enhance the efficacy of Western policy but also provide a clearer path toward a stable and democratic Iran,” Vidal-Quadras said.

Matthew Levitt, director of the Reinhard Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told the conference: “The Iranians are very much committed to avenging the killing of late General Qasem Soleimani. They’ve been targeting newly reelected President-elect Trump, John Bolton, a former secretary of state, and others. It’s very serious stuff.”

“The most prominent trend that we see in Europe is the use of criminal cutouts. In some cases, they'll hire Eastern European gangs, for example, and those gangs will then hire youths. So in Sweden, for example, Iran hires criminals, who hire kids to lob grenades over the walls of the Israel Embassy.”

Levitt said Iran’s use of international terrorism was a tactic designed to silence critics.

“What the regime does is not misbehavior. It is murder. It cannot get worse. We need to do much more,” he said.

“The regime has committed more than 450 terrorist acts in the world. We need a policy change to deal with its terrorism. Real pressure on the regime works. Sanctions alone would not do the trick.”

Levitt said that even when Iran was negotiating the Iran nuclear deal in 2016, there were plots being hatched against dissidents by Iran’s IRGC in France and Germany.

“I can’t tell you if this is just the Iranian regime being extremely aggressive, or if this is a case of right hand, left hand,” he said.

Levitt said that within every bureaucracy there would be different cliques engaged in their own projects who may not be talking to each other, and he said that may be the case with the Iranian “security bureaucracy.”

Police officers investigate two blasts near the Israeli Embassy in Copenhagen, Denmark, on Oct. 2, 2024. Ritzau Scanpix/via Reuters

Bob Blackman, a Conservative MP, criticized Belgium’s decision to release and expatriate Assadollah Assadi, an Iranian diplomat implicated in an attempt to blow up an NCRI meeting in 2018.

Blackman, who attended that event and was sitting close to NCRI leader Maryam Rajavi, said, “If the plot by Assadollah Assadi to bomb the NCRI’s grand meeting in Paris in 2018 had succeeded, we would have faced World War III.”

The conference, which was attended by 28,000 people, was chaired by Struan Stevenson, former Scottish Conservative MEP, who said the West, and in particular the EU and the United Nations, were relying on a failed policy of “appeasement” when dealing with the Iranian regime.

Stevenson said Western governments’ strategies in response to the Iranian regime’s aggression had served “only to embolden the ruling clerics.”

“Since it hijacked the revolution in Iran in 1979, the mullahs’ regime has done everything in its power to eliminate anyone who opposes their theocratic tyranny, and particularly, they have done everything to eliminate supporters of the main democratic opposition movement, the People’s Mujahideen of Iran, including 30,000 political prisoners who were massacred in 1988,” he said.

Former Portuguese Socialist MEP Paulo Casaca said the EU was complicit in these crimes by not holding Iran’s leaders to account.

Ingrid Betancourt, a former Colombian presidential candidate and former hostage, also accused the West of appeasement.