NEW YORK-
When the U.S. military two years ago took over parts of Iraq once controlled by a group dedicated to the violent overthrow of Iran’s government, the FBI detained and questioned hundreds of the organization’s members.
Among them, the U.S. government alleges in court documents, was a naturalized U.S. citizen who left behind her Virginia home to become a top official for the Mujahedeen Khalq, an Iranian militia that fought the clerical establishment in Tehran.
Zeinab Taleb-Jedi, now 51, resurfaced in March after flying from Jordan to New York, where she was arrested. She faces up to 15 years in prison on charges of providing support to a terrorist organization.
Her attorney, Justine Harris, said Monday that given the U.S. government’s labeling of Iran as a sponsor of terrorism, “it’s outrageous it would seek to prosecute a woman who has actively opposed that regime.”
“We believe this is an unfair and unfounded prosecution,” she said.
The Mujahedeen Khalq, also known as the People’s Mujahedeen Organization of Iran, and its affiliates were deemed foreign terrorist organizations by the U.S. State Department in 1997. The designations bar anyone in the United States from providing material support. In the court papers obtained Monday, the group was identified as Mujahedin-e Khalq.
Taleb-Jedi, who became a naturalized U.S. citizen 10 years ago, was identified as a leader of the group by two confidential informants, the court documents say.
In 2004, U.S. soldiers seized tanks, anti-aircraft weapons, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and more than 420,000 pounds of plastic explosives that had been under the group’s control in Iraq. At the time, Taleb-Jedi told agents she “wholeheartedly supports the Mujahedin,” the papers said.
Since being released on $500,000 bond, she has been living at a women’s shelter in Manhattan, say the papers, which were obtained from Brooklyn court files on Monday.
The defendant, who was born in Iran, came to the United States on a student visa in 1978 to pursue a master’s degree in political science in Georgia, court papers said. She later moved to New York City before settling in Virginia, where she became a naturalized U.S. citizen.
In her FBI interview, Taleb-Jedi told agents her husband joined the Mujahedeen and went to Iraq in 1986. In 1999, after learning her husband was killed in a bombing, she “left her job, sold all her belongings and traveled” to the group’s Ashraf Base in Iraq, 40 miles north of Baghdad, documents said.
Arguing for her client’s release at an arraignment, Harris said Taleb-Jedi had returned to the United States to see her adult son and to seek medical treatment for a severe digestive ailment that had pushed her weight down to 95 pounds.
She is “a middle-age woman with absolutely no record,” the lawyer said.
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