BOSTON — State and federal authorities revealed Monday that two men, including one living in Natick, are facing serious charges for allegedly supplying Iran with supplies used in a deadly drone strike that killed three US soldiers, the Justice Department said Monday.
The FBI said the two suspects supplied materials to Iran connected to a drone strike on Tower 22, a base in Jordan that killed three United service members and injured over 40 others in January.
Mahdi Mohammad Sadeghi was arrested at his home in Natick in an operation that caused a large police presence on Monday. While Mohammad Abedini was arrested in Milan, Italy.
The FBI is seeking to extradite Abedini to the US to face justice, U.S. Attorney Joshua Levy said.
Both men were arrested on charges of violating U.S. export laws designed to protect sensitive technologies. Abedini will also face conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization resulting in death and providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization resulting in death charges.
Levy said the pair were arrested after FBI specialists who analyzed the drone traced the navigation system to an Iranian company operated by Abedini who relied on technology funneled from the U.S. by his alleged co-conspirator, officials said.
“We often cite hypothetical risk when we talk about the dangers of American technology getting into dangerous hands,” said U.S. Attorney Joshua Levy, the top federal prosecutor in Massachusetts. “Unfortunately, in this situation, we are not speculating.”
In a statement, a spokesperson for Analog Devices Inc., Sadeghi’s employer, said:
“ADI takes its compliance obligations and role in national security very seriously. We have cooperated fully with federal law enforcement and will continue to do so throughout the proceedings. ADI is committed to preventing unauthorized access to and misuse of our products and technology.”
U.S. officials blamed the January attack on the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella group of Iran-backed militias that includes Kataib Hezbollah.
Three Georgia soldiers — Sgt. William Jerome Rivers of Carrollton, Sgt. Breonna Moffett of Savannah and Sgt. Kennedy Sanders of Waycross — were killed in the Jan. 28 drone attack on a U.S. outpost in northeastern Jordan called Tower 22.
In the attack, the one-way attack drone may have been mistaken for a U.S. drone that was expected to return back to the logistics base about the same time and was not shot down.
Instead, it crashed into living quarters, killing the three soldiers and injuring more than 40.
Tower 22 held about 350 U.S. military personnel at the time. It is strategically located between Jordan and Syria, only 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the Iraqi border, and in the months just after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, and Israel’s blistering response in Gaza, Iranian-backed militias intensified their attacks on U.S. military locations in the region.
Following the attack, the U.S. launched a huge counterstrike against 85 sites in Iraq and Syria used by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and Iranian-backed militia and bolstered Tower 22′s defenses.
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