US indictment names Ali as the handler behind RAF Fairford plot

The US Department of Justice's updated indictment, released Tuesday, names the man prosecutors say orchestrated the September incident in a Cotswold village next to RAF Fairford. He is Mohammed Ali al-Hassani, a 35-year-old Iraqi who had lived in Britain for an unclear period and was now using contacts and associates "to carry out terrorist attacks in the UK". Until now, British investigators knew him only as "Ali".

Al-Hassani is one of two associates of Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood al-Saadi who are believed to be in Iran. The 26-page indictment says al-Saadi, locked up in New York awaiting trial, kept calling his family and passing coded messages through them. On or about 24 September he asked after Ali, was told he had been moved to the "International Section", and instructed: "Give him money so we can do it." Within days, the indictment says, Ali's efforts had come together at Fairford.

Al-Saadi was arrested in Turkey in May and extradited to the US within a couple of weeks. In June he appeared in a Manhattan courtroom, calling himself "a prisoner of war", accused of leading a new terror group, Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia (Hayi), as well as being a commander in Kata'ib Hezbollah, an Iraqi group backed by Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps. His capture did not stop the campaign — al-Hassani and Mohsen Mohajeri remained at liberty.

The indictment traces Hayi's spring push. Video obtained by US prosecutors shows Mohajeri telling al-Hassani "We need to get focused on London" on 6 April as they studied a laptop map of the capital; six attacks in London followed shortly after. On 17 April, all three are accused of directing a man in real time to attack a premises linked to the educational charity Jewish Futures in Hendon, north London, where he lit a plastic bag of fluid bottles outside the front of the building and fled. Prosecutors say a FaceTime call, its image projected on a large screen against the Hayi logo, shows al-Hassani coaching the attacker to take a lighter, "light one in your hand", "light it" and "throw the fourth one".

The Hendon arson was basic, but the string of Hayi-linked attacks on synagogues and other Jewish community sites in London in March and April had a wider impact. Roger Macmillan, a former head of security at the London-based independent TV channel Iran International, whose staff have faced threats and harassment from Tehran, argues the capability to hurt people matters less than the fear it creates: "terrorism is not always about massive attacks, it is about instilling fear".

In Westminster, Andy Burnham told MPs in mid-October that the IRGC was "almost certainly" behind Fairford, while home secretary Shabana Mahmood said the incident was "highly likely to have been co-ordinated by a known individual based in Iran, and almost certainly directed by Iran's IRGC". Two weeks later, UK police charged two Britons from London, who await trial accused of assisting Iranian intelligence in breach of the 2023 National Security Act and have yet to plead. Last month Westminster magistrates court heard the men in the vans had been directed to Fairford by a handler called Ali. British courts will decide what happened at the base — but the indictment shows other IRGC-linked figures are accused of orchestrating sabotage on UK soil.