'I feel more at risk in London than Tehran': How Iranian conflict spread to Britain

The offices of Iran International, the Persian-language television news channel, are hard to access nowadays. The property in Chiswick, West London, is surrounded by a three-metre high steel fence and at its base are concrete blocks that prevent any suicide bomber driving a car into the building.

Two armoured police vehicles protect the offices with steel barriers in front of the police cordon to add a further ring of steel. Journalists work for the channel under a threat of death from the regime in Tehran. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

Eight miles north of the business park, the London headquarters of an Iranian opposition group was firebombed, neighbours reportedly witnessing a Molotov cocktail lobbed at the building in the early hours of Monday morning.

The group - People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran - claimed the “clerical regime’s terrorists and operatives” were responsible.

In Iran daily protests and strikes - prompted by the death of Mahsa Amini for refusing to wear a head scarf - are threatening the survival of the Islamic regime. The fight, seemingly, is being continued on London’s streets.

MI5 has disclosed that it was aware of ten plots to assassinate or kidnap “enemies” of the regime on Britain’s streets since the start of the year.

Ken McCallum, MI5’s director general, told reporters last month at a briefing inside the intelligence agency’s headquarters: “The Iranian intelligence services are a sophisticated adversary. Over many years, they have sometimes operated using their own operatives doing things with their own hands, and on other occasions they have co-opted other people to work on their behalf.”

The regime, he said, is “prepared to take reckless action”, the threat of it all too visible on London’s streets.

There is growing frustration that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the branch of the Iranian army accused of peddling terror abroad, has escaped sanctions that would see it proscribed.

The IRGC is already banned in the United States but the British Government’s new list of sanctioned terror groups and individuals issued on Friday did not include the IRGC. Ten Iranian individuals, connected to its revolutionary court and prison system, were included.

Iain Duncan Smith, the former Conservative Party leader and co-chairman of the all party parliamentary group on sanctions, had said he expected IRGC to be “right up there in the firing line”, adding: “If they are not we will kick up very hard.”

His co-chair Chris Bryant said: “With the terrible events in Iran it is appalling and incomprehensible that the Government is still refusing to take action against the IRGC.”

At the Chiswick business park, the armed police and the ex-British military hired by Iran International watch on nervously as Aliasghar Ramezanpour, Iran International’s founder and editor-in-chief, poses for photographs in front of (rather than within) the steel and concrete security barrier. A little over a month ago, counter-terroism police at Scotland Yard contacted him to warn his life was in danger.

Under rules known as an Osman warning, police are duty bound to inform the intended victim of any “real and immediate” death threat. The nature of the death threat is unclear but the Telegraph understands a surveillance team, presumed to be connected to the IRGC, was spotted outside Mr Ramezanpour’s home. There will also be intelligence gathered by police and MI5 which has intensified concern.

The Iran International building is now under round-the-clock protection and so too Mr Ramezanpour’s home in west London where he lives with his wife. He was offered a safe house but has declined to move.

He came to London in 2007, having fled Iran following a crackdown on the free press. “Right now I feel more at risk in London than I did back then in Tehran,” said Mr Ramezanpour, 61. “The regime is cornered. In Iran we are a proscribed organisation which gives the regime legal cover to attack us. Some of my family remain in Iran and sometimes they get summoned by the IRGC who question them about me. There is a big welcome for me if I come home.”

Police have not told Mr Ramezanpour the “details”, but he said: “They just suggested to me I move from home to a safe house. I refused to go. If I do that they win.”

Iran is in turmoil right now, its cities caught up in protests that followed the death in September of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who died in custody after being arrested by the country’s notorious morality police for not wearing a headscarf. On Thursday, Iran announced the first execution of a protester convicted by the Revolutionary Court of being a “rioter”.

Almost 3,000 miles away in London, security services have become increasingly alarmed by the regime’s behaviour. Iran has long been considered a rogue state but in his annual threat update, Mr McCallum knew what he was doing in deliberately calling out the Islamic regime.

Then on Monday, the exterior of the offices of the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran caught fire after a shed next to its offices was set on fire. “There is no current information to suggest a targeted attack at this time, and it is not being treated as terror-related,” said Detective Superintendent Tony Bellis, but added: “Due to the location of the incident and the organisation based at the adjacent premises, the investigation is also being supported by specialist officers from the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command.”

These are febrile times. In Maida Vale, the Islamic Centre of England (ICE), a pro-regime mosque and cultural centre, has also been attacked, this time by protesters wanting to overturn the Islamic republic.

At the end of September, hundreds of demonstrators marched first on the Iranian Embassy in Kensington before turning their anger on the Islamic Centre. Several police officers were hurt in trying to maintain public order and prevent the crowds breaching the ICE’s fencing.

The ICE, based in a former cinema, is effectively an outpost of the Tehran regime, a branch of Iran’s Islamic republic in a wealthy, central London suburb. Its governing document requires that its head be appointed directly by Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei while its funding comes directly from Tehran.

The ICE is currently under investigation by the Charity Commission, which has lost patience with its director Seyed Moosavi, a cleric appointed in 2019.

In 2020, the charity watchdog issued ICE with an official warning after it held a candlelit vigil for the IRGC general Qasem Soleimani, designated a terrorist by the UK government who had been assassinated in a US drone strike. Mr Moosavi praised Soleimani as a “great martyr”. The vigil has exposed the ICE to the risk of committing a terrorist offence in its praise and support for the dead general.

Then last month, the Charity Commission had finally had enough, launching a statutory inquiry, the most serious investigation that can be undertaken. The ultimate sanction would be to strip ICE of its charitable status. What sparked the latest watchdog intervention was Mr Moosavi’s astonishing attack on the protesters against the regime back in Iran. They were, he said in a speech broadcast on social media, “soldiers of Satan” and the women, who had joined by refusing to wear hijabs, were simply spreading “poison”.

The outburst prompted calls for ICE to be shut down. Kasra Aarabi, an Iran analyst at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, posted on Twitter: “It’s clear the views propagated at the centre are a direct threat to British values & citizens. The centre should be shut-down & Khamenei’s representatives should be expelled.”

The ICE’s tentacles are spread wide. There are connected centres in other UK cities, according to Iran-watchers, in Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow and Newcastle.

The Jewish Chronicle reported links between ICE and a nearby school called Iris - but which is short for Islamic Republic of Iran School.

The Jewish Chronicle uncovered an Iranian propaganda video of children in the playground joining in a song entitled “Hello Commander”. The newspaper went further suggesting the song - about mythical warriors fighting infidels - was connected to a modern doctrine in which the goal is the destruction of the state of Israel.

The ICE has declined to speak to the Telegraph but a spokesman told the Jewish Chronicle last month insisted that the version of the song sung by the children had no such meaning, and had “nothing to do with a political agenda”.

Meanwhile, Iran International will keep broadcasting despite the threats, beamed into Iran’s homes from Chiswick via satellite and over the internet. Its staff are determined to keep going despite the threats. Britain’s counter-terrorism police and security services are holding their breath.