On November 9, 2023, Alejo Vidal-Quadras was walking along a Madrid sidewalk after attending Mass when a scooter pulled up behind him and a gunman fired a single 9mm round into his face. The former Spanish vice president of the European Parliament and Vox co-founder barely survived: sixteen days in the hospital, facial reconstruction, and scars that will never fully fade.
The timing was no accident. Four weeks after Hamas’s October 7 massacre, as Vidal-Quadras waged a fierce media campaign against Spain’s anti-Israel line, Tehran had already marked him for death. In 2022, Iran’s foreign ministry placed him atop its enemies list due to his pro-Israel stance and his long support for the Iranian opposition in Europe, especially the National Council of Resistance of Iran and the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran. To the ayatollahs, he was not a critic. He was a target.
According to European investigators, the triggerman was French-Tunisian criminal Mehrez Ayari. The middlemen were the Mocro Mafia. The client was Iran’s regime, outsourcing murder for deniability.
The going rate runs from $1,150 for surveillance photos to $400,000 for an assassination, alongside a safe haven in Iran or Dubai.
After the 2018 diplomat-led bomb plot in Paris failed, Tehran adapted. It shifted to proxies and built a shadow network of European criminals. The going rate runs from $1,150 for surveillance photos to $400,000 for an assassination, alongside a safe haven in Iran or Dubai as part of the bargain. No Iranian passports. No fingerprints. Just outsourced chaos inside the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) space.
The scale is staggering. Since 1979, Iran has launched more than 100 terror plots across Europe, with more than half between 2021 and 2024 alone; at least sixteen involved criminal proxies.
Dutch intelligence linked the shooting of Vidal-Quadras and a parallel assassination attempt against an Iranian activist in Haarlem, Netherlands, to Tehran’s use of criminal networks. Those same networks were also behind the murders of two Iranian dissidents in the Netherlands in 2015 and 2017.
In Sweden, the network of Kurdish Iranian-born gangster Rawa Majid, known as the “Kurdish Fox” and now sheltered by Tehran, became so central to this model that the United States sanctioned them in March 2025. They carried out Iranian-directed grenade attacks on Israeli embassies and Jewish communities in Stockholm and Brussels. The group even recruited teenagers as young as 13, turning Swedish suburbs into proxy battlegrounds and feeding the country’s gang-murder surge.
Sanctioned Iranian narco-boss Naji Ibrahim Sharifi-Zindashti runs another murder-for-hire network stretching from Turkey to Canada. It handles assassinations and kidnappings, outsourcing jobs to Hells Angels and other mobsters. In New York, two Eastern European criminals accepted $500,000 from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to target journalist Masih Alinejad; a third one was arrested outside her home with an AK-47.
However, Europe remains the main battlefield. Since 2022, British intelligence has disrupted more than twenty Iran-linked kidnap or kill plots in the United Kingdom, many relying on drug gangs and street criminals. In 2024, German and French police also broke up cells paying to photograph Jewish sites for targeting.
The partnership is deadly because it pays. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps protects Afghan narcotics routes for Dubai-based cartels flooding Rotterdam and Antwerp with cocaine. These same pipelines move weapons, launder money, and transport hired killers. The criminals get cover and cash. Tehran gets a deniable terror infrastructure to hunt Jews, Israelis, and critics across the West.
Militarily weak and economically strangled by sanctions, the [Iranian] regime has turned Europe’s gang wars into a weapon.
Even royalty was not immune. The same Mocro Mafia network connected to the Vidal-Quadras case was also implicated in a 2022 plot to kidnap Dutch Crown Princess Catharina-Amalia. She then spent a year in hiding, ironically in Madrid, while Karim Bouyakhrichan, the Mocro Mafia leader who put a hit on her, was simultaneously released from a Spanish jail due to a “judicial error.”
This amounts to a sharper phase of hybrid war. Militarily weak and economically strangled by sanctions, the regime has turned Europe’s gang wars into a weapon while the West still chases de-escalation.
In July 2025, the United States, the United Kingdom, and a dozen European allies formally condemned these sovereignty violations. Yet European sanctions on the Zindashti and Foxtrot networks are nothing more than a patchwork. The ports remain wide open, the prisons remain penetrated, and the suburbs remain vulnerable.
The targeting of Alejo Vidal-Quadras puts it plainly: The Iranian regime pays criminal networks to carry out attacks, recruits mafia organizations to do its dirty work, and the West does nothing to stop it.
In Spain, Pedro Sánchez’s government’s response to the Vidal-Quadras case said it all: no serious condemnation of Tehran, no Iranian ambassador summoned, and no meaningful diplomatic pressure. Madrid, like much of the West these days, chose “diplomatic avoidance” over defending a former vice president of the European Parliament who was nearly gunned down for backing Israel and Iranian freedom.
If Tehran’s hired gangsters can target Western politicians, dissidents, and even future royalty with impunity, then anyone is next.
