Alejo Vidal-Quadras, a longtime supporter of the Iranian opposition, tells Larisa Brown how he survived being shot in the head on a Madrid street last year. The plot centres on three suspects, from Spain, Tunisia — and Britain.
As a “protected person of high risk”, Alejo Vidal-Quadras has several Metropolitan Police officers guarding the London hotel suite when we meet. But it is his wife, Amparo, who makes him feel safe. “The fact I travel with my wife is very necessary,” the 79-year-old says, adding that ever since he was the target of an assassination attempt several months ago, Amparo has been by his side during his international travels.
This two-day visit to London is important because he is seeing some parliamentarians and his “friends in the Iranian resistance” to discuss his case. A security team met him as soon as he landed at the airport.
“If I am being watched now by the regime, I don’t know. This protection is because this terrorist regime must be, I guess, very much disappointed and frustrated because I wasn’t killed. One never knows if they can try it again, eh?” he says. There is an uncomfortable silence as those in the room — other members of the Iranian opposition — appear to contemplate the prospect of a second attack. “My wife is a great help,” he quips, lightening the mood.
Vidal-Quadras, a long-time supporter of the Iranian opposition, speaks with a raspy voice because the bullet that ripped through the right side of his jaw and out the left was so hot it burnt his throat. He is apologetic as he asks me to speak slowly and loudly, because he has lost 40 per cent of his hearing as a result of the attack. He looks remarkably well for a man who was placed in an induced coma after reconstructive surgery. He now has metal plates holding his jaw together.
Amparo, with her jet-black hair and piercing dark eyes, draws up a list of those arrested or wanted in connection with the attack while occasionally muttering reminders in her husband’s ear. They have three children — two girls, one boy — the youngest of whom is 20. We joke about whether she is trained in martial arts but the rest of the conversation is deadly serious.
It involves a highly sophisticated espionage operation, a notorious Moroccan crime gang wreaking havoc across Europe and a man they call a “born killer”.
Vidal-Quadras believes it was Iran that set out to kill him on November 9 last year as he returned home from a walk in the park around lunchtime. He was 30 metres from his apartment in the wealthy Salamanca neighbourhood — known for its footballers and celebrities — in the centre of Madrid when a man called out, “Hola, señor,” making him turn round. He was shot at close range with a 9mm Parabellum pistol, so named after the Latin phrase Si vis pacem, para bellum — “If you want peace, prepare for war.” The bullet shattered his jaw and narrowly missed his neck and brain. “The police told me that the intention was to shoot me in the neck. Because there are two lethal shots: one to the head, of course, and the other in the neck. Then there was the miracle,” he says.
The bullet missed his neck and went through his jaw instead. Blood splattered onto the pavement. A passerby used his jacket to stem the bleeding. “If I had been alone, I would have died because of the bleeding,” Vidal-Quadras says. The hitman, described by eyewitnesses as a young man, about 5ft 9in tall and dressed in jeans and a blue jacket, fled on a scooter.
Two hours later, at 3.39pm, the vehicle’s charred remains were found on an industrial estate half an hour away from the scene of the shooting. The police managed to recover the number plate, leading to multiple arrests. Amparo interrupts. Vidal-Quadras has said too much and she is worried it could interfere with the investigation. He doesn’t finish the sentence. He has been privy to little information because the investigation has been declared “secret” by the judicial system, he adds.
Five people have so far been arrested as part of the investigation, but the suspected gunman — Mehrez Ayari, a 37-year-old French national of Tunisian origin who has several previous convictions in France — remains at large. There is an international manhunt under way for him spanning Libya, Tunisia and Morocco.
This chain of events all started for Vidal-Quadras in 1999 when he arrived at the European parliament as a member of the conservative People’s Party (PP).”It is a long story,” he says when asked how he became involved in Iranian affairs, although he is more than happy to tell it. Back then, Vidal-Quadras, a Catalonian who was born in Barcelona, knew little about Iran or its domestic politics. He was approached by Paulo Casaca, a Portuguese socialist, who invited him to join a group called Friends of a Free Iran. Casaca had noticed Vidal-Quadras’s interest in human rights cases linked to Spain and thought he was a good match.
It didn’t take long for Vidal-Quadras to be introduced to key figures in the Iranian opposition, including Maryam Rajavi, president-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) — a broad coalition of democratic Iranian organisations, groups and personalities that considers itself a parliament in exile. The fact it has chosen a woman as its president-elect for the transitional period after the fall of the clerical regime is significant. One of Rajavi’s sisters, Narges, was killed by the Shah’s secret police in 1975. Her other sister, Massoumeh, an industrial engineering student, was arrested by the Khomeini regime in 1982. Pregnant at the time, she was tortured and hanged. Her husband was executed too. Vidal-Quadras was moved by Rajavi’s story. He wanted to help.
“At the end I got very involved to the point that nowadays I have the privilege to be enemy No 1 of the regime,” he says, leading to nervous laughter in the room.
As his interest in Iran grew, so too did his political influence. He went on to become vice-president of the European parliament between 2009 and 2014 before co-founding the far-right Vox party.
Such was his prominence in Iranian affairs that in 2022 the Iranian foreign ministry slapped sanctions on him. Vidal-Quadras hands me a list of those sanctioned across the table, with his name — at the very top — highlighted in yellow. He and others on the list were accused of “deliberate acts to support terrorism” among many other things. “They wanted to scare us,” he says. Yet he persisted in his campaigning for a better future for Iranians.
Then came the assassination attempt. In the days after the shooting, three people were arrested, one in Fuengirola near Malaga and a couple identified as Naraya Gomez and his girlfriend, Sasha Brooks, a British expat in her twenties, who were detained at one of two properties they shared in Lanjaron, an Andalusian spa town on the southern slopes of Spain’s Sierra Nevada, near Granada.
Residents described the arrests as “like something from a movie”, with masked police seen searching the property for three days, removing boxes and suitcases from the house. Brooks, with long, wavy, dark brown hair and several tattoos, was described by those who knew her as beautiful, popular and “very vibrant and fashionable”. She was the type of woman “you could see hanging out at fashion shows or boutique hotels, not taking part in acts of terror”, one local British expat told The Sun.
Gomez was apparently brought up by his father, Sirio, in a “hippy-style commune” after his mother died in childbirth. Locals painted a picture of his father as a poor man who taught yoga and his son as a well-dressed, polite individual who “had a love for the finer things in life, like travel and high-end cars”. Sirio told reporters he was a “good boy, a vegetarian, spiritual and a pacifist”. Social media accounts belonging to the couple showed recent trips to London and Ibiza, with Sasha photographed in a bikini on a yacht while sipping champagne.
Vidal-Quadras’s interest was piqued when police sources claimed Gomez was suspected of converting to Islam last year. They said he followed a Shia belief system led by the clerics of Iran. Yet Gomez’s father disputed the claims.
The couple appeared in court along with the third suspect, named locally as Adrian Ruiz Blanco, 22, in November.
Without officially identifying the suspects, Spain’s National Police said in a statement at the time that the detainees were accused of “attempted assassination for terrorist purposes”. They said they were suspected of providing the perpetrator of the crime with the “logistical support needed to carry out the terrorist act”.
“During the investigation it was also shown the attack on Alejo Vidal-Quadras was prepared meticulously for weeks before the day he was shot,” the statement read. Vidal-Quadras had been put under surveillance, and planning meetings for the attack had taken place in different parts of Spain. Blanco and Brooks were released on conditional bail and Gomez was remanded in prison.
Gomez, 26, is understood to be accused of hiring the contract killer, Ayari, before travelling with him to a hotel in Madrid on the eve of the attack. According to the police, Gomez followed Ayari in his car on the day of the shooting.
Gomez’s blue hire car was spotted on CCTV in Barrio Salamanca in Madrid in the weeks leading up to the attack, supposedly tracking Vidal-Quadras. When the same car was found illegally parked in Lanjaron later in November, the couple were arrested.
The case took a further twist in January this year when investigators were alerted to a Venezuelan man named Greg Oliver Higuera Marcano. He was tracked down to Colombia, to where he allegedly had fled after learning that the Spanish authorities were looking for him. It was reported that as he tried to enter Colombia, the immigration police checked his background and saw there had been a red alert notice issued for him. According to the Colombian immigration service, Interpol had issued the alert for suspected terrorism offences. It is believed that Marcano is in the process of being extradited back to Spain so that he can face trial in Madrid.
In April this year there appeared to be a further breakthrough as a Dutch woman, believed to be of Moroccan origin, was arrested in relation to the shooting. The woman was detained in the Netherlands after Spain issued a European arrest warrant for her “alleged participation in the financing and preparation of the attack”.
Vidal-Quadras says he was followed for weeks as those involved tried to establish his routine ahead of the attack. “It was a very sophisticated, well-prepared attack. It took time to organise it,” he says.
The focus now is on locating the suspected gunman and trying to ascertain who ordered the assassination and why. For Vidal-Quadras, the answer is clear: the Iranian regime.
The Spanish newspaper El Mundo points the finger at the Dutch “Mocro mafia”, a reference to the Moroccan or immigrant origins of powerful drug-smuggling networks. The gangsters are barely on the radar of British police and security agencies, but in Europe they are well known.
Dr Teun Voeten, an anthropologist specialising in organised crime, tells me these criminals are “completely ruthless” and known for their extreme violence. “They have ordered many contract killings and executions,” he says. His words are chilling.
In February, Ridouan Taghi, the leader of the drugs cartel, was sentenced to life for his part in a murderous campaign in the Netherlands, which prosecutors called a “well-oiled killing machine”. Labelled the drug kingpin of Europe, Taghi was convicted of five murders. Yet even as he was locked up in a maximum security isolation cell in the country’s toughest jail, he appeared to be acting from inside with impunity, ordering the elimination of people connected to a key witness against him.
“We are talking about ruthless, disruptive violence in which human life is worthless,” said the judge delivering the verdict. “[Taghi] decided who would be killed and spared no one. The amount of suffering he caused is hard to imagine.”
A US Drug Enforcement Administration document leaked in 2019 identified Taghi as one of the leaders of a “super-cartel” alongside Irish, Italian and Bosnian mafia bosses thought to control a third of the cocaine trade in Europe.
Voeten says Taghi had travelled to Iran a couple of times in recent years and had “good connections with the Iranian regime”. He believes it is “very well possible” that the cases are linked. “If they can make money in coke or contract killings, they do it. They are just in it for the profits. Wherever they can make money, they make money,” he says, suggesting the gangsters would have no problem in switching their work to contract killings for the Iranian regime.
Vidal-Quadras is convinced Iran contracted the gangsters to carry out the hit last year as part of its latest modus operandi. One of the group’s leaders is thought to have identified Ayari as a suitable candidate to assassinate Vidal-Quadras given his dark criminal past. He had earned the nickname “the Stoner” after allegedly stoning a confidant to death, and those familiar with his background described him as a “born killer” with a predisposition towards violence. If the links are proved, the attempted murder of Vidal-Quadras might be the first targeted killing by the Mocro mafia in Spain that is unrelated to internal disputes.
“In the past, the commanders sent [people] from Iran… Now they have changed methods. They pay mafias to do the job,” Vidal-Quadras says.
Rather than just target Iranian dissidents, he is sure they are going after politicians who dare criticise the regime. “They are scaling up their attacks. Before, you could say this is a fight between Iranians; now they are trying to kill western political figures,” he adds, referencing a plot to kill former Trump national security adviser John Bolton in 2021. The plot, one of the best-documented alleged assassination efforts, was part of what US prosecutors and former government officials described as efforts by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IGRC) to eliminate those behind an airstrike that killed the head of the guard’s elite Quds Force, Qassem Soleimani, in 2020.
According to Spanish police sources speaking to Vidal-Quadras, Ayari has two brothers, one of whom is in prison in France and the other is subject to an arrest warrant in Belgium. “All of them have long penal records dating from a young age for drug trafficking, theft and assassination,” he says. He believes one of Ayari’s brothers is “classed as a very dangerous criminal” who has already carried out work for the Iranian regime, although he doesn’t back up the claim with evidence. He is adamant “there are many signals” that point the finger towards Iran.
A British security source wouldn’t be surprised if Iran was using a group like the Mocro mafia to carry out its killings.
“We’ve been saying for a while that the Iranians use organised crime networks to carry out attacks and to give them plausible deniability. They seem to use a range of criminal gangs rather than rely on any one group,” the source says.
They explain that assassination jobs also sometimes get passed around criminal gangs. “You might start off with one and it might get subcontracted to someone else,” they add.
More recently, security agencies in the UK have become increasingly concerned that Russia has adopted Iran’s techniques by paying foreign criminal groups or gangsters to carry out surveillance operations.
By paying proxy groups rather than using their own agents, the countries have a degree of deniability. In the case of Russia, the proxy groups are also able to fill a gap exposed after Britain expelled Russian intelligence officers from the UK following the Salisbury poisonings and Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
More recently, Dylan James Earl, a British man, was accused of espionage activity on behalf of Russia while arranging an arson attack on a business linked to Ukraine. It is alleged that Earl was taking instructions from the Wagner mercenary group, which has close ties to the Kremlin.
Also in the room with us is Vidal-Quadras’s friend, the Iranian dissident Hossein Abedini. Like the Spaniard, he has spent the past four decades trying to expose the Iranian regime’s brutal practices and human rights abuses. He also knows what it is like to be hunted. He has survived multiple attempts on his life — the first in March 1990 when an assassination squad shot him in the chest and abdomen after an ambush in Istanbul. Abedini is among a number of Iranian dissidents now living in London who have been contacted by counterterrorism police warning them of an increased risk of violence and kidnapping given spiralling events in the Middle East.
Potential targets were told that Tehran was using criminal proxies to carry out assassination attempts, death threats and other intimidation tactics. There were fears in MI5 and the police that Iran, emboldened by conflict sparked by the October 7 terror attack by Hamas in Israel, could ramp up its activity in the UK.
Earlier last year the same agencies accused Tehran of more than a dozen assassination and kidnap plots in Britain against dissidents and reporters during a two-year period.
In March, Pouria Zeraati, a prominent Iranian television journalist, was stabbed multiple times outside his London home. Within hours of the attack in broad daylight, the two perpetrators, along with a third suspect who drove their getaway car, had fled the country on a flight out of Heathrow.
Vidal-Quadras says that the West’s policy in relation to the Islamic Republic during the past 40 years has been one of appeasement. “Appeasement, negotiations, dialogue and concessions,” he says.
“It is a fact that this policy has failed. All these attacks, all these proxy militias in the Middle East, they practise war-mongering and terrorism and the more the West tries to appease them, the more aggressive they get.”
Vidal-Quadras is determined to see Iran isolated internationally and financially strangled through more economic sanctions during his lifetime.
Written by: Larisa Brown
© The Times of London