Four Iranians have been charged with plotting to kidnap a New York-based journalist and human rights activist critical of Iran and take her back to Tehran, the US Department of Justice says.
Court papers did not name the target, but Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejad said it was her.
Authorities said the accused – alleged intelligence officials – also plotted to lure a person in the UK and three others in Canada to Iran.
Ms Alinejad, who became a US citizen in October 2019, said she had been working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation since the agency approached her eight months ago with photographs taken by the plotters.
“They showed me the Islamic Republic had gotten very close,” she said.
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Her White Wednesday and My Stealthy Freedom campaigns have seen women film themselves without head coverings or hijabs in public in Iran, and she has also contributed to the US government-funded Voice of America Persian language service.
FBI agents warned the writer she was being watched earlier this year and moved her and her husband to several safe houses as they investigated the case, she said.
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They even asked the 44-year-old to conduct a live video online to see if Iranian intelligence could track her.
The four defendants hired private investigators under false pretences to carry out surveillance on the journalist in Brooklyn, filming her family and home, according to prosecutors.
Image: The writer and human rights activist has been critical of Iran
They claimed she was a missing person from Dubai who had fled the country to avoid paying a debt, it is alleged.
They planned “to forcibly take their intended victim to Iran, where the victim’s fate would have been uncertain at best”, said Audrey Strauss, attorney for the Southern District of New York.
It is alleged they had even researched getting her out of Manhattan on a high-speed boat headed for Caracas, Venezuela.
“Every person in the United States must be free from harassment, threats and physical harm by foreign powers,” Acting US Assistant Attorney General Mark J Lesko added.
“Through this indictment, we bring to light one such pernicious plot to harm an American citizen who was exercising their First Amendment rights.”
Ms Alinejad said Iranian operatives had tried several times to trick her into going to Turkey with threats and promises to meet family.
“I knew that this is the nature of the Islamic Republic, you know, kidnapping people, arresting people, torturing people, killing people. But I couldn’t believe it that this is going to happen to me in United States of America,” she said.
She added the alleged plot wouldn’t stop her from doing her work: “I have only one life and I’m not going to live in paranoia. I’m not going to live in fear. I have two options – feel miserable, make my oppressors feel miserable, so I choose the second one.”
William F Sweeney Jr, head of New York’s FBI office, noted that the indictment sounded a bit like “some far-fetched movie plot”.
“We allege a group, backed by the Iranian government, conspired to kidnap a US-based journalist here on our soil and forcibly return her to Iran,” he said.
At least two people have been killed and eight others critically injured in a shooting on the campus of Brown University in Rhode Island, officials have said.
The incident is believed to be unfolding near an engineering building on the campus, according to the school’s alert system.
Providence Police and the Rhode Island State Police are responding.
It is unclear at the moment whether arrests have been made.
Brown University says no suspects are in custody and that additional shots may have been fired.
US President Donald Trump corrected an earlier post he shared online, clarifying that a suspect was not in custody. In his previous post, he had stated that a suspect was in custody.
University officials initially told students and staff that a suspect was in custody, but later said this was not the case and police were still searching for a suspect or suspects.
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Officials noted that the information remained preliminary as investigators try to determine what has occurred.
Police are actively investigating and still gathering information from the scene, said Kristy DosReis, the chief public information officer for the city of Providence.
The shooting was reported near the Barus & Holley building, a seven-storey structure that houses the School of Engineering and Physics Department, according to the school’s website.
It includes 117 laboratories, 150 offices and 15 classrooms.
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Brown is a private university with roughly 7,300 undergraduate students and more than 3,000 graduate students.
Providence Council member John Goncalves, whose ward includes the Brown campus, said: “We’re still getting information about what’s going on, but we’re just telling people to lock their doors and to stay vigilant.
“As a Brown alum, someone who loves the Brown community and represents this area, I’m heartbroken. My heart goes out to all the family members and the folks who’ve been impacted.”
This breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly.
Donald Trump has said the US “will retaliate” after three Americans were killed in a suspected Islamic State attack in Syria.
Two US service members and one civilian died and three other people were injured in an ambush on Saturday by a lone IS – also often called ISIS in Syria and Iraq – gunman, according to the he US military’s Central Command.
The attack on US troops in Syria is the first to inflict fatalities since the fall of President Bashar Assad a year ago.
“This is an ISIS attack,” the US president told reporters at the White House before leaving for the Army-Navy football game in Baltimore.
He paid condolences to the three people killed and said the three others who were wounded “seem to be doing pretty well”.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, Mr Trump said “there will be very serious retaliation”.
The shooting took place near historic Palmyra, according to the state-run SANA news agency, and the casualties were taken by helicopter to the al Tanf garrison near the border with Iraq and Jordan.
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The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the attacker was a member of the Syrian security force.
Syria’s Interior Ministry spokesman Nour al Din al Baba said authorities are looking into whether the gunman was an IS member or only carried its extreme ideology, and denied reports suggesting he was a security member.
Central Command earlier said in a post on X that the gunman was killed, while the identities of the service members killed wouldn’t be released until 24 hours after their next of kin have been notified.
Pentagon chief spokesman Sean Parnell said the civilian killed in the attack was a US interpreter.
US defence secretary Pete Hegseth posted on X: “Let it be known, if you target Americans – anywhere in the world – you will spend the rest of your brief, anxious life knowing the United States will hunt you, find you, and ruthlessly kill you.”
The US has hundreds of troops deployed in eastern Syria as part of a coalition fighting IS.
The group was defeated on the battlefield in Syria in 2019 but the UN says the group still has between 5,000 and 7,000 fighters in Syria and Iraq, and its sleeper cells still carry out deadly attacks.
Syria’s interim president, Ahmad al Sharaa, made a historic visit to Washington DC last month as Syria signed a political cooperation agreement with the US-led coalition against IS.
“This was an ISIS attack against the US, and Syria, in a very dangerous part of Syria, that is not fully controlled by them,” Mr Trump said in his social media post, adding that Mr al Sharaa was “extremely angry and disturbed”.
National Guard troops went door-to-door on Friday to evacuate a farming city north of Seattle as severe flooding in western Washington state put levees at risk.
Days of torrential rain have swelled rivers to record or near-record levels, as flooding has stranded families on rooftops, washed over bridges and ripped homes from their foundations.
Burlington, a city of nearly 10,000 residents near Puget Sound – a large inlet of the Pacific Ocean in northwestern Washington – was placed under a full evacuation order with people told to leave immediately and move to higher ground.
The Skagit River, a major waterway that flows from the Cascade Mountains through the Skagit Valley before emptying into Puget Sound, surged to a record high of nearly 38ft (11.6m) at Mount Vernon, about 10 miles south of Burlington.
“We haven’t seen flooding like this ever,” said Karina Shagren, a spokesperson for the state’s emergency management division, adding that there had been no reports of injuries or missing individuals so far.
Image: Pic: Reuters
Image: Pic: Reuters
National Guard troops and sheriff’s deputies were going door to assist with the evacuations.
Some responders were seen paddling stranded Burlington residents to safety in inflatable river rafts through the muddy floodwaters.
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Later on Friday, the evacuation order was lifted for part of the city, Burlington police department spokesperson Michael Lumpkin said.
However, while water levels appeared to ease a little, Mr Lumpkin said “it’s definitely not an all-clear”.
The intense rainfall was driven by an atmospheric river, a massive stream of moisture drawn from the ocean and carried inland over the Pacific Northwest earlier in the week.
Although rainfall has begun to ease, the National Weather Service has issued a flash-flood warning for the Skagit River basin all the way downstream to its mouth at Puget Sound.
Image: Snohomish, around 40 miles south of Burlington, has also been affected. Pic: Reuters
Image: Pic: Reuters
The swollen waters could put enough strain on levees to cause them to fail, the weather service noted.
“Extensive flooding of streets, homes and farmland will be possible” if levees and dikes give way, it said.
The Burlington-Mount Vernon area in Skagit County continues to be the hardest-hit area, facing extensive flooding from days of heavy rainfall stretching from northern Oregon through western Washington and into British Columbia.
National Guard troops were also dispatched to deliver food and check on stranded residents in a number of communities cut off by flooding in adjacent Snohomish County, south of Skagit County.
The flooding washed out or forced the closure of dozens of roads throughout the region, including most of the Canadian highways leading to the port city of Vancouver in British Columbia.
Parts of northern Idaho and western Montana have also been impacted.