The FBI added Shahram Poursafi, a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who allegedly solicited the murder of two former U.S. government officials between October 2021 and April 2022, to its “Most Wanted” terror list on Tuesday.
The FBI is seeking information about Poursafi, for whom a $20 million reward is being offered, and about three of his Iranian terror associates: Mohammad Reza Ansari, Abolfazl Alizadeh and Mohammad Hossein Shamoradizadeh.
The plots against U.S. officials likely were intended to be retaliation for the U.S. assassination of Iranian Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani, according to court documents.
Poursafi, who also goes by “Mehdi Rezayi,” was charged in 2022 with “using interstate commerce facilities in the commission of a murder-for-hire and with providing and attempting to provide material support to a transnational murder plot,” the FBI said.
Gregory Heeb, special agent in charge of the FBI Washington Field Office’s counterterrorism division, stated that the bureau “will not stand for the IRGC’s brazen attempts to silence, harm or murder activists, dissidents, journalists, public officials or anyone else it deems a threat.”
The Quds Force specializes in unconventional warfare and military intelligence operations and oversees Iran’s terror proxies abroad.
The bureau said that Ansari is a deputy in the IRGC-Quds Force’s 840 unit and supports its operations in Syria. Alizadeh and Shamoradizadeh are battalion commanders in the Basij Imam Ali Battalion and have allegedly “participated in lethal plotting,” the bureau said.
The U.S. Department of the Treasury has sanctioned Ansari and Poursafi for acting on behalf of the IRGC-Quds Force.
