Iran is suspected of collecting information on Jewish targets in Berlin to prepare for possible attacks, German authorities said Tuesday following the arrest of an alleged spy working for Tehran.
The man, a Danish national identified as Ali S., was detained by Danish agents last week on the request of German authorities and is awaiting extradition to Germany, the general prosecutor’s office said.
In early 2025, Ali S. was ordered by an Iranian intelligence service to gather information about Berlin’s Jewish community and prominent Jewish personalities, the prosecutor’s office said.
Ali S. is then thought to have driven to Berlin and taken photographs of at least three buildings, including the seat of the German-Israeli Society and another where Josef Schuster, the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, had occasionally resided, according to a German official.
The official said Ali S., a Danish national of Afghan origin, was believed to have acted under the instructions of the Quds Force, an elite section of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that is mainly responsible for foreign operations.
The official said the investigation was in an early phase and that it was unclear whether the surveillance would have led to an attack.
“The arm of the mullahs’ terror reaches all the way to Germany and Europe,” said Schuster, whose organization represents Germany’s 125,000-strong Jewish community. “The German government should not only remain vigilant, but actively take political action against the Iranian regime.”
The Islamic Republic and its proxies in the Middle East have a long history of targeting domestic opponents, Jewish people and Israeli citizens around the world, going back to the years following the 1979 revolution that toppled the pro-Western Iranian monarchy.
Security officials in Europe have been concerned for some time that a militarily weakened Tehran, further destabilized by Israeli and U.S. strikes at home, could return to terrorism overseas to hit back at its enemies, in part by exploiting grassroots concerns about the conflict in Gaza.
The latest case bears some similarity to earlier Iranian intelligence operations in Germany and other European countries.
In 2017, a Pakistani national was jailed for more than four years for gathering information about Reinhold Robbe, a center-left politician and former chairman of the German-Israeli Society, which authorities thought might have been in preparation for an attack.
“The judge…established in his verdict that the agents had explored all possibilities to kidnap me—or worse,” Robbe told the Tagesspiegel daily recently. “I didn’t notice a thing.”
Authorities have accused Iran of being behind two killings in the Netherlands in 2015 and 2017, and an attempted murder in Denmark in 2018. In late 2023, a court found a German-Iranian man guilty of planning to firebomb a synagogue in the city of Düsseldorf and said he had been encouraged to do so by contacts within Iran.
Western security officials have said Tehran was increasingly turning to criminal networks in the West to target dissidents, critics and Jews. Iran has said it doesn’t engage in assassination or abductions abroad and called the plots it has been accused of false-flag operations or fabrications by Israel, dissident organizations and Western intelligence services.
In the most spectacular case to date, Assadollah Assadi, an Iranian diplomat stationed in Vienna, was arrested while driving through Germany in 2018 on suspicion of plotting to bomb an Iranian opposition rally outside Paris. A Belgian court later convicted him and three accomplices of planning the attack, handing them prison sentences ranging from 15 to 20 years.
The trial showed Assadi had crisscrossed Europe ahead of his arrest, visiting locations in 11 countries, including the Islamic Center Hamburg. German authorities shut the center down in 2024, saying it had spread extremist propaganda on behalf of the Iranian regime.
Belgium released Assadi in 2023 in exchange for a Belgian aid worker detained by Tehran.