Biker gangs and hired hands: how Iran is increasingly outsourcing its terrorism campaigns

‘The Iranians are not intimidated by law enforcement and they will go where the targets are.’ Photograph: Henry Nicholls/AFP/Getty Images

To some it was the moment the mask slipped. Wearing an open-necked white shirt, Mohsen Rafighdoost, former minister of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), was filmed last March fondly reminiscing with an interviewer from the Tehran-based Didban Iran news website about the assassinations he had organised around Europe.

There was Prince Shahriar Shafiq, the last Shah of Iran’s 34-year-old nephew, who was shot twice in the head outside his mother’s home in Paris in 1979.