A young man from Haifa and three others suspected of manufacturing explosives at an Iranian agent’s behest as part of a plot to “harm a senior figure” are set to be charged in court in the coming days, police said Thursday, after a gag order was lifted on the case.
Haifa resident Ami Gaydarov, 22, was arrested on March 9 on suspicion of maintaining contact with an Iranian intelligence agent since last August.
The senior figure in question was widely reported to be former prime minister Naftali Bennett, who has been a target of Iranian espionage efforts in the past.
The young man allegedly rented an apartment in the city’s downtown area as a makeshift laboratory, so he could create and test the materials with his alleged accomplices.
A Lahav police investigator who spoke to the Ynet news site said Gaydarov — with the help of his handler — managed to create TATP, a highly volatile explosive often used in terror attacks due to its relatively simple recipe. He reportedly made 8-10 kilograms (18-22 lbs) of the material, storing it in jars.
Police said he was assisted by others, among them Haifa residents Sergey Leibman and Edward Shovtiuk, who are set to face charges in the coming days. They allegedly helped him purchase ingredients and hide and test the material.
The fourth suspect has not yet been named.
On top of manufacturing explosives, police said Gaydarov was also instructed to take photos of the Haifa Port and missile impact sites in northern Israel during the war with Iran, currently on pause after a ceasefire was declared this week.
Gaydarov received a total of NIS 70,000 ($23,000) in exchange for the tasks he carried out, most of it in the form of cryptocurrency, police added.
The case was investigated jointly by the Shin Bet security service and police’s Lahav 433 major crimes unit, and was previously subject to a gag order, parts of which have been gradually lifted.
Rauf Najjar, the defense attorney for alleged accomplice Shovtiuk, told The Times of Israel that an indictment was expected Monday against the suspects.
Najjar said his client “suffers from a complex health and mental situation” and insisted that he “fully cooperated with the investigating unit” during his interrogation.
“We can respond extensively after we receive the indictment and scans of the investigation materials,” he added.
Iran-linked actors have for several years been attempting to spy on prominent Israeli politicians, security officials and scientists, presumably with the goal of harming them. To this end, they have been known to enlist ordinary Israeli citizens they meet online — usually via the Telegram messaging app — to spy for money.
The alleged plot marked a relatively rare instance in which an Iranian agent managed to convince his Israeli recruit to go a step beyond spying or vandalism, and begin plotting violence.
Like most Israeli recruits, Gaydarov was started out by his handler with mundane tasks — filming in the street and sending his location from areas he was ordered to travel to. These requests gradually escalated into serious offenses like espionage and intelligence gathering.
Unlike Gaydarov, most recruits have been known to spurn agents’ suggestions to harm or assassinate Israeli public figures.
Earlier exceptions to this included a pair of Jewish young men from Tiberias, arrested while preparing to fly to Iran for shooting training, and a group of seven young men from Beit Safafa, an Arab neighborhood in East Jerusalem, who planned to assassinate a prominent scientist and mayor of a major city.
