The international intrigue involving the Italian journalist Cecilia Sala extends to Brazil. The young woman, 29 years old, She was arrested in Tehran on December 19 y locked up in the Evin prison complexafter the arrestDecember 16, two Iranian citizensone in Italy and another in the United States. According to exclusive information to which he has had access Infobae, one of the two Iranians involved in the case traveled from Boston to Brazil on December 2landing in Joinville, a city of about 600,000 inhabitants in the southern state of Santa Catarina. The region is one of the most industrialized in the country and has the presence of important companies manufacturing electronic components and drone technology. The Iranian, who also has American nationality, is Mahdi Mohammad Sadeghi42 years old, resident in Natick, a municipality of 36,000 inhabitants in the state of Massachusetts.
According to the testimony of the FBI special agent who handled the case, He is an electronic engineer with training in Iran and the United States. It was Sadeghi’s first and only trip to Brazil, where he stayed six days. The Iranian returned to the United States on December 7, nine days before being detained at the same time as Mohammad Abedini Najafabadialso known as Mohammad Abedini. Abedini was stopped by Italian police at Milan’s Malpensa airport while en route from Türkiye to Switzerland, where he resides.
Abedini and Sadeghi were charged by the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) “of conspiring to export sophisticated electronic components from the United States to Iranin violation of US export control and sanctions laws,” reads the DOJ statement. “Abedini is also accused of provide material support to a foreign terrorist organizationwhich caused the deaths of three US service members who were killed by a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle), also known as a drone, at a military base in Jordan,” the statement continued, referring to the January 28 attack. 2024 in which about 40 people were also injured.
According to Matthew S. Axelrodfrom the Department of Commerce, in the same statement, “The two are accused of providing sensitive technology to an Iranian company that develops technology that the IRGC uses in its one-way attack drones to commit acts of terror around the world.”. These are the Bodies of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard (IRGC), considered a terrorist organization in the United States, but not in Italy. Both Abedini and Sadeghi pleaded not guilty to the crimes charged. Sadeghi worked for an American semiconductor company from which he was fired after his arrest. According to FBI testimony, he had also created his own company in Massachusetts “in the wearable fitness device industry, specializing in wearable sensors that provide kinetic monitoring.”
The arrest of the two Iranians, in particular that of Abedini, is at the center of the case of the Italian journalist. The US government has already initiated a request for Abedini’s extradition, while the Iranian has rejected the charges and requested his release. On Thursday, it was the Iranian ambassador to Italy himself, after a meeting with representatives of the Italian Foreign Ministry in Rome, who correlated the journalist’s arrest with that of Abedini in a post on X. “Consular access to the Italian embassy in Tehran, all necessary facilities have also been provided to Ms. Sala, including repeated telephone contacts with her loved ones, and the Italian government is expected to reciprocally, in addition to accelerating the release of the detained Iranian citizen, provide the necessary care facilities that it requires,” wrote the ambassador Mohammad Reza Sabouri. However, Cecilia Sala’s family has denounced the very harsh conditions of the journalist’s imprisonmentwhile the Italian authorities are guaranteeing Abedini all the rights provided for by international law.
The case broke out at a delicate global moment, not only because of the change in the US between the Biden and Trump administrations. According to an exclusive report Thursday from geopolitical analysis site Axios“White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan presented President Biden with options for a potential U.S. strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities if the Iranians move toward a nuclear weapon before January 20.” Biden, however, according to Axios“did not approve the attack during the meeting and has not done so since.” The situation also remains delicate for Latin America. On January 10, Venezuela sees its new president take office and, as if Maduro does not take a step back, the situation risks moving towards a dangerous escalation. Maduro’s Venezuela, and even before that of Chávez, is among the countries in the region that have opened their doors the most to Tehrannow beginning to produce Zamora V-1 drones based on the Iranian Shahed drones. Iran has been supplying drone technology to Venezuela since 2007, starting with assembly kits for the first-generation Mohajer-2 surveillance drone, which has a range of 50 kilometers. Iranian authorities began mass production of the Mohajer-6 combat drone in 2018. So far there are no known cases of Iranian-designed Venezuelan drones used in terrorist attacks. However, for several military experts, they could be used by the Venezuelan regime itself in a desperate attempt to defend itself in case the population rises after January 10.
Even in Brazil, which since January 1 has presided over the BRICS bloc of which Iran has been a member since the beginning of 2024, Tehran is interested in expanding militarily. In February 2023, the Brazilian government allowed the two main Iranian warships, the IRIS Makran and the IRIS Dena, to stop in Rio de Janeiro for a week at the end of February, not without controversy. Furthermore, last April, the Iranian embassy, in an event it organized to celebrate the Day of the Brazilian Armed Forces, reinforced its plans to increasingly strengthen relations with Brazil also in the field of defense. “I hope that defense relations between Iran and Brazil will become increasingly closer,” declared the Iranian military attaché, Colonel Mahdi Moghaddam. Yesterday was the anniversary of the general’s death Qassem Soleimanikilled in an attack by a US drone in Baghdad (Iraq) on January 3, 2020. Since 1988, commander of the Quds Force, considered a terrorist organization by the US, Soleimani is currently presented on the social networks of Iranian entities in Brazil as “the standard bearer of the fight against terrorism.” As many analysts report, including journalist and writer Kim Ghattas of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Soleimani “was hated, not only by Sunnis who suffered at the hands of his proxy militias in Syria and Iraq, but also by Shiites.” , including some in Iraq and Iran, where he helped sustain a repressive system and was seen as responsible for Iran’s role in costly foreign wars.” According to the US State Department statement issued after his death, “General Soleimani and his Quds Force were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of US military and coalition members and the wounding of thousands more.”
Among the strategies that Iran is following in Brazil, in addition to military and government relations, is that of local relations on the groundas it is already doing in other countries in the region, such as Ecuador. Governors, mayors and local representatives are the new objectives of the Tehran government, which also tries to support cultural exchanges between the two countries. Brazil, like the rest of the region, continues to be one of the main export centers of the Iranian revolution, which has among its main propaganda tools the Ali Mustafa University, sanctioned in 2020 by the United States and later by Canada, for hosting and training Pakistani and Afghan Shiite militias in Syria in support of the Bashar al Assad regime. According to the US Treasury, Al-Mustafa University “serves as an international recruiting network for the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps,” which directs Iran’s terrorist operations outside the country. Behind the Al-Mustafa is Mohsen Rabbanicurrently on Interpol’s red list, accused of being the mastermind of the attacks against the Israeli embassy in 1992 and against the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA) in 1994 in Buenos Airesin which 114 people died and hundreds were injured.
Also within the framework of the regime’s propaganda activities, one of Ali Khamenei’s ayatollahs, Hassan Alemi or Alami, visited Brazil, São Paulo and the Ponta Grossa mosque, in Paraná, in August 2024. It is from the investigation into the AMIA of the Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman, who died in 2015, that the Iranian networks are interested in Brazil because of its geography, but also because of the important Shiite community in the Triple Frontier. Two reports, one from 2016 from Veja magazine and another more recent one from 2023 from the news site Behind the Scenesthey went so far as to denounce “a clandestine Iranian base in San Pablo.” According to Behind the Scenes“the alleged presence of agents and media at the service of the Iranian intelligence apparatus in the capital of São Paulo is hidden by a network of front companies, which use false addresses, a network in which Iranians with diplomatic cover participate. This network has been in operation for at least ten years.”
