Prosecutors identified the mastermind of the plot as Naji Sharifi Zindashti, 49, who resides in Iran, and accused him of recruiting a team of militants through an encrypted messaging service to travel to Maryland to assassinate the two men. According to court documents, Zindashti spent months preparing the plot with the help of Canadian citizens 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 letters exchanged between the defendants between December 2020 and March 2021, as described in court documents. In another message, Pearson told Ryan: “We have to remove his head from his torso,” according to the documents.
“Today’s charges demonstrate a pattern of Iranian groups trying to kill American citizens on American soil,” Susan Turner, assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, said in a statement Monday. “Mr. Zindashti and his associates’ alleged conspiracy is reprehensible, the FBI will not tolerate such actions against U.S. residents, and we will continue to pursue these individuals until they are brought to the United States to face justice.
The Justice Department said Zindashti is based in Iran. The United States does not have an extradition treaty with Iran. Prosecutors have been cooperating with authorities in Canada regarding Ryan and Pearson, who are currently imprisoned there on unrelated charges. Federal officials did not specify a possible motive, but they accused the Zindashti Network of killing and kidnapping critics of the Iranian government in the past.
On the same day the indictment was unveiled, US Treasury officials announced a series of sanctions against Zindashti, whom they accused of targeting Iranian dissidents at the request of Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security. The sanctions prevent Zindashti and his key associates from engaging in any transactions related to the United States.
According to court documents, the defendants communicated using the Sky ECC encrypted messaging service. Zindashti recruited 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 was “going to make sure I hit this guy in the head at least halfway through the clip,” according to court documents. Pearson said he could charge more than $100,000 for the job, to which Ryan responded that he would “get you what you want,” the documents say.
According to prosecutors, letters exchanged between Zindashti and Rayan show that the couple agreed to pay $350,000, plus an additional $20,000 to cover travel expenses.
According to the Department of Justice, the maximum penalty for those convicted of federal “murder-for-hire” crimes is 10 years in prison and a fine, with that penalty extended to 20 years when it results in personal injury and life imprisonment or death when the conspiracy results in death.
A federal grand jury in Minnesota indicted the three men in December for conspiring to use interstate commerce to commit a murder-for-hire plot. Pearson was also charged with two counts of unlawful possession of a firearm.
“The Zindashti Network carried out numerous transnational acts of repression, including assassinations and kidnappings, across multiple jurisdictions in an attempt to silence critics of the Iranian regime,” the Treasury Department said. She added that Iran “is increasingly relying on organized criminal groups… to conceal ties with the Iranian government and maintain plausible deniability.”
The officials accused Zindashti's associates of involvement in the kidnapping of Habib Shaab, an exiled Iranian opposition figure who was lured to Istanbul in 2020, drugged, and smuggled into Iran. Al-Shaab, a dual Iranian-Swedish citizen, was executed in May 2023 after being accused in a closed trial of masterminding a 2018 attack on a military parade.
The Treasury Department claimed that the Iranian government also “used Zindashti and his men” to carry out the assassination of Masoud Vardanjani, a government critic and former Iranian cybersecurity official, in Istanbul in 2019. Zindashti was also behind the killing of two men, one of whom the department said was a British-Iranian dissident, in 2017.
The Iranian government has been accused in recent years of coordinating a series of audacious plots to assassinate and kidnap expatriate Iranians who criticize it.
In 2019, dissident journalist Ruhollah Zam was lured from his home in France to Iraq, transported to Iran and hanged the following year.
In a separate case, Jamshid Sharmahd, a dual German-Iranian citizen residing in California, was kidnapped during a stop in Dubai and taken to Iran. He was accused of leading a “terrorist” group and sentenced to death after what the Treasury Department described as a “show trial” in April 2023.
On American soil, the Iranian government was accused of planning the assassination of 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.
