John Jefferson
Two Iranian men have been charged in connection with a fatal drone strike earlier this year that killed three U.S. military service members and injured dozens more.
Mahdi Mohammad Sadeghi was arrested in Massachusetts and was expected to appear in court Monday. The other suspect, Mohammad Abedininajafabadi, was arrested in Italy and was in the custody of Italian authorities, federal prosecutors said.
The charges are linked to the deadly Jan. 28 strike against U.S. forces, the first since the Israel-Hamas war began in October 2023.
Three Army reservists – Sgt. William Jerome Rivers; Spc. Kennedy Ladon Sanders and Spc. Breonna Alexsondria Moffett, all Georgia residents – were killed on Jan. 28 in Jordan and 47 others were injured in a drone attack that targeted a small military base known as Tower 22 near the Syrian and Iraqi border.
All three were assigned to the 718th Engineer Company, 926th Engineer Battalion, 926th Engineer Brigade, in Fort Moore, Georgia.
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The soldiers were deployed in Jordan in support of Operation Inherent Resolve, the U.S. military’s name for the war against the Islamic State terror group.
Rivers, 46, served in the Army Reserve as an interior electrician; while Sanders, 24, and Moffett, 23, worked as horizontal construction engineers.
In response to the deadly attack, the U.S. launched retaliatory strikes on more than 85 targets in Iraq and Syria against Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force and affiliated militia groups.
The targets included command and control operations, intelligence centers, militia group’s rockets, missiles, unmanned vehicle storages and supply chain facilities, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) said at the time.
The soldiers’ deaths marked an escalation of violence against U.S. forces in the Middle East. At the time, the Biden administration blamed the attacks on U.S. support for Israel amid its ongoing war against Hamas.
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