Iran TV journalist stabbed in ‘murder plot’

Pouria Zeraati, 36, flashed a victory sign while dressed in a hospital gown as he recovers after being knifed by a two-man team in Wimbledon

Iran TV journalist stabbed in ‘murder plot’

An Iranian TV journalist who was stabbed outside his flat in southwest London in an apparent murder plot has vowed to return to work as he shared a defiant photo from his hospital bed.

Pouria Zeraati, 36, flashed a victory sign while dressed in a hospital gown as he recovers after being knifed by a two-man team in Wimbledon.

He was rushed to hospital after the stabbing on Friday, where he is in a stable condition. He is said to be doing ‘very well’ and bravely smiled in an Instagram snap he shared to reassure his 619,000 followers.

The prominent dissident journalist, who works for the Iran International TV channel, has been repeatedly targeted by Tehran as the media organisation is openly critical of the government’s regime.

It is believed his attackers were either agents working directly for the Iranian government or a criminal gang hired by Tehran targeted Mr Zeraati, who hosts the high-profile Last Word show in London.

They escaped the scene in a waiting car, counter terror police investigating the attack has said. MI5 is also supporting officers in the hunt for the knifemen.

According to The Times, initial indications suggest one of the gang asked Zeraati for cash and then held him in a bear hug while the second operative approached and stabbed the opposition journalist in the leg.

Mr Zeraati’s wife, Oldouz Rezvani, 37, was inside their home as her husband was knifed on the street outside as he made his way to work.

His work colleague Adam Baillie spoke to the couple in hospital yesterday, according to The Sunday Times, who said his wife was touched by all the messages of support and was ‘very happy that he’s still alive’.

‘Pouria says he is feeling a lot better and is really looking forward to getting back to work, but we don’t know when that is likely to be,’ he said.

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A neighbour who was walking with a friend down Queensmere Road, where the attack took place, and witnessed the aftermath, has told the Evening Standard that they saw the alleged assailants flee the scene.

He said: ‘It’s a very quiet suburban road and we saw two young men sprinting towards us, about 20 yards away and then got into a car. They sped off.

‘It felt odd. The two men were laughing, quite clearly laughing. I looked two of them in the eye – they were no more than a cricket pitch length away from me.’

He said they took down the number plate seconds before they came across a man who was trying to flag them down in need of assistance.

‘We tried to give first aid and take his jeans off. He had been stabbed, I think four times. He had his jeans on and he had a pool of blood on his leg. It was [awful] to see.’

The unnamed neighbour, who does not know Mr Zeraati personally, went on to say that the stabbing was ‘really out of character for the area,’ and that he believed ‘It was targeted, not a random attack.’

In December, it was revealed that Iranian officials plotted to kill two of Zeraati’s colleagues, Sima Sabet and Fardad Farahzad.

Ex-BBC journalist Ms Sabet said that following the attack on Mr Zeraati, police warned her to leave her home.

‘The Metropolitan Police’s Counter-Terrorism Unit last night urged me to immediately leave my residence following a knife attack on [Mr Zeraati], and stay elsewhere until further notice,’ she posted on X today.

She described the attack on Mr Zeraati as a ‘serious warning and an extremely troubling act for all journalists and opponents of the Islamic Republic in Britain and other Western countries’.

Speaking to the BBC yesterday, she said she was ‘outraged’ by the attack and slammed the government, suggesting it was not taking the threat ‘seriously’.

‘We should feel safe, this is our country, this is our home, we are UK nationals being threatened at our home,’ she said.

‘If the UK government were taking this seriously, if the UK government had met with me… we have to have a channel of being communicated to, being heard by the government.’

As the threat to Ms Sabet and her colleague came to light at the end of last year, Magomed-Husejn Dovtaev was jailed for spying on journalists at Iran International on behalf of Tehran.

The station admitted they have been regularly targeted by Iran’s revolutionary guards.

The London-based dissident channel aims to provide independent coverage of Iran, but the Tehran regime has declared it a terrorist organisation.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) has been targeting journalists and their families, Mr Baillie said.

Iran’s charge d’affaires in the UK Mehdi Hosseini Matin said ‘we deny any link’ to the incident.

Mr Baillie told BBC Radio 4’s Today: ‘We can’t say. The fact that counter-terrorism is leading the investigation probably speaks for itself.

‘Along with our colleagues at BBC Persian, Iran International has been under threat, very heavy threats, for the last 18 months since the IRGC said ‘we’re coming for you‘, which they have consistently repeated.’

He said the IRGC ‘get in touch through proxies, they don’t leave a paper trail’.

‘No one’s going to call up from the IRGC and go ‘hey, it’s us’, but families have been taken in for questioning and threatened.’

He added: ‘The scale of that has increased dramatically over the last few months, and the scale and the type of questioning is more aggressive, ‘tell your relatives to stop working for this channel’ and so on.’

The Met said in a statement the motivation for the attack was not yet clear, his occupation coupled with recent threats towards UK-based Iranian journalists meant the probe was being led by specialist counter-terrorism officers.

Commander Dominic Murphy, Head of the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command, said: ‘While we are keeping an open mind, given the occupation of the victim and our publicised concerns about the threat to employees of that organisation, the investigation is being led by the Counter Terrorism Command.

‘I must stress that, at this early stage of our investigation, we do not know the reason why this victim was attacked and there could be a number of explanations for this.

‘While we continue to assess the circumstances of this incident, detectives are following a number of lines of inquiry and our priority at this time is to try and identify whoever was behind this attack and to arrest them.

‘I appreciate the wider concern this incident may cause – particularly amongst others in similar lines of work, and those from Iranian communities.

‘We continue to work closely with the victim’s organisation and as a precaution we’ll have additional patrols in the Wimbledon area as well as other sites around London to provide reassurance over the coming days to those affected and concerned.

‘Finally, I would urge anyone in the Wimbledon area who may have seen anything or anyone acting suspiciously today to get in touch with us.’

Since 2022, a number of plots to either kidnap or kill British or UK-based individuals perceived as enemies of the Iranian regime have been disrupted by police, it is understood.