German prosecutors charge two Iranian-Quds agents over Berlin plot to assassinate Volker Beck and Josef Schuster

The Federal Prosecutor's office in Karlsruhe announced charges on Thursday against two men alleged to have worked for Iran's Revolutionary Guard in a plot targeting senior figures of Germany's Jewish community. Ali S., a 54-year-old Danish national living in Aarhus, faces charges of intelligence agency activity, sabotage-purpose agency activity, and attempted participation in murder and serious arson. His co-defendant Tawab M., a 42-year-old Afghan national also from Aarhus, additionally faces attempted participation in murder. Both were arrested in Denmark — S. in June 2025, M. in November 2025 — and have been in German pre-trial detention since their extradition. The indictment was filed before the Staatsschutzsenat of the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court in Hamburg.

According to the prosecutor's account, Ali S. "works for the intelligence service of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and maintains close contacts with their special unit, the Quds Force." In early 2025 he was directed to collect information on Volker Beck — chair of the German-Israeli Society and a former Green Party member of the Bundestag from 1997 to 2017 — and on Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. He was also tasked with scouting two Jewish-owned food retailers in Berlin, and Spiegel and ARD reported he photographed the headquarters of the German-Israeli Society. In May 2025 Ali S. contacted Tawab M., who agreed to procure a weapon for a third party to carry out an attack on Beck.

The lead originated with a foreign intelligence service identified by German authorities and Spiegel sources as Israel's Mossad. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU) confirmed the foreign-service tip after the original arrests. Beck told Reuters he had been placed under special police protection during the summer of 2025: "I couldn't even take out the garbage alone." He sharply criticised Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul (CDU) for saying Germany could do without Israeli intelligence: "I would probably be dead without it. German arrogance has absolutely no basis when it comes to security questions." Beck called for the expulsion of Iran's ambassador to Germany and for the freezing of assets held in Germany by the family of the late supreme leader Ali Khamenei, killed in the Iran war.

Gady Gronich, general secretary of the Conference of European Rabbis, called for a Europe-wide terror designation of the Revolutionary Guard, saying "the Iranian regime is waging a systematic war of terror against Jews, against Israel and against democratic societies — in the middle of Europe and on German soil." German security agencies regard Germany as particularly exposed because of its close ties to Israel; the Iran war the United States and Israel have been fighting against Tehran has, in their assessment, raised the attack threshold inside Germany.

A pattern is taking shape across Europe. On 10 April a Munich Israeli restaurant was firebombed with no injuries, and a claim of responsibility came from an obscure pro-Iranian group calling itself Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al Islamia, or Hayi, which has also claimed attacks on Jewish or American facilities in London, Antwerp, Liège and Amsterdam. The alleged ringleader, a Shia Iraqi, was recently arrested in Turkey at the request of US authorities and extradited to the United States. Several lower-level perpetrators in Europe have been identified: young, often already criminal, willing to carry out arson for relatively small sums — a recruitment model German services note resembles Russia's tradecraft for similar operations.