Stabbings, kidnaps and terror campaigns: How Iran's mad mullahs are ordering ... trends now

One Saturday afternoon last February, 31-year-old Magomed-Husejn Dovtaev took a Wizz Air flight from Vienna, where he lived, to London's Gatwick airport.

After putting away four pints at the Beehive, a Wetherspoon pub in the South Terminal, the burly father of three, originally from Chechnya, hired a minicab to ferry him to London for the princely sum of £120. In the taxi, he played the role of first-time tourist, asking what landmarks he should visit before informing the driver that he hoped to find some 'nice English girls' to entertain him.

'How is the English girls?' he asked, somewhat sleazily. 'Are they good with men or are they crazy?' The driver responded that the best way to find out would probably be to visit one of the various nightclubs near Piccadilly Circus.

Dovtaev never made it to London's West End, however. Instead, his mini-break was rudely interrupted, a couple of hours later, by armed police. They swooped on a Starbucks in Chiswick Business Park, where he was drinking a mug of coffee, and detained him under the Prevention of Terror Act.

Fast forward to December and a jury at the Old Bailey found the bearded holidaymaker guilty of using his brief trip to collect information for terrorist purposes. He was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in jail.

During a seven-day trial, the court heard that Dovtaev, who had links to organised crime, had actually flown to London to carry out a 'hostile reconnaissance' mission against Iran International, a Persian-language TV station then based in a large office building at the West London business park.

Jurors were shown CCTV footage of him wandering around the building's perimeter, wearing a dark baseball cap and surgical face mask. He was filming on a mobile telephone and seemed to pay particular attention to its security fences, car park entrance and fire escapes.

When guards wearing hi-vis jackets asked Dovtaev what he was doing, he offered a series of odd explanations. First, that he was visiting a 'brother' who lived nearby. Second, that he was staying with an unnamed 'friend'.

In a police interview, he changed his story again, insisting in broken English that he'd decided to shoot videos of Iran International's HQ 'to show my children, as there is a lake there' and had been 'in wonder at the architecture' of the drab office blocks.

The truth, investigators swiftly concluded, was far more sinister. His flight to the UK had actually been booked a mere 24 hours before take-off, by an anonymous third party based in Azerbaijan, using a Russian email address.

At Vienna airport, he'd then accessed a different Russian email account and logged into Signal, an encrypted messaging service. It was used to send him other videos, shot on at least three previous occasions, showing the outside of Iran International's HQ.

Dovtaev didn't have a brother in the UK. Neither did he boast any London-based friends. Instead, he'd been hired — almost certainly by Iran's security services — to obtain footage that would help terrorists plan an attack on the TV station.

The Chechen crook's trial and eventual conviction for the above crime, which concluded just before Christmas, was neither the first, nor regrettably the last, time that the London-based rolling news channel and its staff have been placed in the firing line.

For almost five years, employees of this small and fiercely independent broadcaster, which boasts a worldwide audience of around 30 million viewers, have faced escalating threats from Iran's ruling mullahs, who have branded them 'terrorists' for having the temerity to scrutinise the despotic regime's affairs.

Journalists and members of their extended families have been sent death threats and been the subject of multiple kidnap attempts. At least one plot to set off a car bomb outside their studio has been foiled. And an array of Eastern European criminals, much like Dovtaev, have been offered large sums of money to research, intimidate and in some cases attempt to kill them.

The terror campaign is being conducted with staggering impunity. Following Dovtaev's conviction, Scotland Yard told reporters that Iran, and its proxies, had mounted at least 15 credible plots to kill dissidents or journalists on UK soil since 2022. According to MI5, at least a dozen employees have been warned that the theocracy's Ministry of Intelligence intends to snatch them off the streets unless they quit.

It's all part of a state-sponsored terror network with tentacles that stretch across Western Europe.

Last month, it emerged, for example, that Iran had sent agents to a range of countries using the cover of Afghan asylum seekers. One such couple lived in Sweden as part of a 'sleeper cell' until 2021 when they were 'activated', apparently to assassinate three prominent Jews. Fortunately, they were arrested by security services before the hit could be carried out.

In the UK, this scandalous state of affairs culminated in grisly fashion last Friday on a leafy street in Wimbledon, a stone's throw from the All England Tennis Club.

At around 3pm, Pouria Zeraati, host of Iran International's Last Word programme, was walking to his car outside the block of flats where he lives with his wife, when he was approached by two men of Middle Eastern appearance.

One grabbed him in a bear hug; the other pulled out a knife and stabbed him four times in the leg. As he lay with blood spurting from the wounds, the assailants jumped into a waiting blue Mazda, driven by an accomplice, and fled.

The vehicle was found abandoned in New Malden, a couple of miles away. Counter-terrorism police, who are investigating the attack, believe that all three suspects left the UK on flights from Heathrow that evening. Zeraati was lucky: after being helped by passers-by, who managed to stem the bleeding, he was rushed to hospital and patched up. By that evening, the 36-year-old was well enough to pose for an Instagram photo.

He's since been discharged and is recovering at an undisclosed location. 'Pouria is on the mend and hoping to return to work shortly,' a colleague tells me.

'It's an awful incident and chilling that something of this nature can happen on a British street in broad daylight. But the threat is a shadow that we have all had to live under for the past couple of years, so we just have to grit our teeth and get on with it.'

Many staff at the TV station have previously lived in Iran, so have first-hand experience of the authoritarian government's response to dissent, he added.

What is odd, however, is the degree to which this hard line is being pursued in the UK. 'The brazen nature of this incident shows that, even in Europe, there are very few limits to what Iran thinks it can now get away with.'