Two Iranian men were charged Thursday with plotting a terror attack against the Israeli embassy in Nairobi, Kenya.
Sayed Nasrollah Ebrahim and Abdolhosein Gholi Safaee were arrested Tuesday after taking pictures of the Israeli embassy on their mobile phones while in an Iranian diplomatic car, prosecutor Duncan Ondimu said. Their driver, a Kenyan, has been charged with abetting terrorism.
The arrests came shortly after Ebrahim and Safaee went to Kamiti Prison to visit Ahmad Abolfathi Mohammad and Sayed Mansour Mousavi, two members of Iran’s Qods Force serving 15 years in prison after being convicted in 2013 for planning terror attacks against Western targets.
Another two Iranians, Abubakar Sadiq Louw, and Yassin Sambai Juma, confessed in 2015 to being spies for the Qods Force.
Iranian agents have been accused of planning multiple attacks on Israeli and American targets worldwide in recent years, including in Azerbaijan and Thailand.
Ebrahim and Safaee’s use of an official car is not the first time Iran has leveraged diplomatic cover to hide its destabilizing behavior. The U.S. State Department’s counterterrorism coordinator testified to Congress in 1994, shortly after Iranians with diplomatic IDs were accused of planning the bombing of the AMIA Jewish Community Center in Argentina, that Iranian embassies are often overstaffed with personnel, with many of them possibly intelligence agents or terrorist operatives.
Journalist Armin Rosen described Iran’s strategy in Desperate For Allies and Secret Assets, Iran Penetrates Africa, which was published in the September 2013 issue of The Tower Magazine.
In Africa, as in the Middle East, Iran has a longer game in mind. Even in the absence of any solid diplomatic alliances or victories, Iran is using its relationships in Africa to organize and advance its ambitious aims and terrorist networks. With its traditional diplomacy stifled, Iran has exhibited a worrying ability to overcome even Yarmouk-level setbacks — to accumulate asymmetrical victories for its aggressive, anti-western agenda.
[Photo: AP Archive / YouTube ]