The Instagram page of Ramin Yektaparast, a former Hell’s Angels leader alleged to be coordinating Iranian regime attacks on Jewish targets in Germany. Photo: Screenshot

Police in Germany believe that the Iranian regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) was behind a series of attacks on Jewish targets during November under the direction of a former leader of the Hell’s Angels biker gang.

Shots were fired at the Old Synagogue in Essen, an attempted arson attack was recorded at a synagogue in Dortmund and a Molotov cocktail was hurled at a Jewish school in Bochum. All three cities are located in the state of North-Rhine Westphalia.

Earlier this month, police arrested a 35-year-old German-Iranian man who was allegedly responsible for the attack in Bochum and who attempted to recruit another individual for the attack in Dortmund. According to the ARD broadcaster’s Kontraste program on Thursday night, local police suspect that the man is connected to Ramin Yektaparast, the founder of the Hell’s Angels chapter in the city of Mönchengladbach. Yektaparast is understood to have fled to Iran last year to escape trial for the brutal murder and dismemberment of another member of the gang in 2014, according to German media reports. Six other men went on trial for the killing during the summer.

German investigators believe that Yektaparast, whose dormant Instagram page features both the Iranian and German flags, is affiliated with the IRGC’s operations in Germany. As well as the attacks on Jewish institutions, investigators reportedly discovered a credible plot to target Josef Schuster, the president of the Central Council of German Jews.

“We’re talking about state terrorism here,” one investigator told ARD.

Over the last year, concern has increased globally regarding Iranian-directed terrorist operations abroad. In August, the US Justice Department charged a member of the IRGC with plotting to murder John Bolton, a national security adviser to former President Donald Trump, while in the same month, a man alleged to be an Iranian operative was arrested with a loaded AK-47 rifle outside the home of Masih Alinejad, a prominent critic of the Iranian regime, in Brooklyn, New York.

News of the German discovery coincided with intensified anti-regime protests in Iran itself, where human rights activists said a man, named as Mehran Samak, was shot dead by security forces in the town of Bandar Anzali on Tuesday night amid celebrations of the Iranian national soccer team’s 1-0 loss to the USA at the World Cup in Qatar. Celebrations were also reported in several other Iranian cities; many Iranians are hoping for their own team’s defeat as a protest against the Islamic Republic’s continued rule.