An investigation by one of Switzerland’s leading newspapers raises as many questions as it answers
The daughter of a former candidate for the Iranian presidency, and student at one of Switzerland’s leading universities. A member of the Basij – the volunteer militia Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) – who later set up a tourism company. Another former student of the same university, accused of smuggling high-tech items used in Iranian drones.
A highly suggestive article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung by Fabian Baumgartner, Florian Schoop, Jan Ludwig (with arresting illustration by Anja Lemcke) draws together these biographies to paint a shadowy picture – the article uses the word “Schattennetz”, meaning shadow network – of Iranian regime influence in Switzerland. It’s a familiar tale: an authoritarian regime under sanctions exploiting the relative openness of democratic societies and their institutions to conduct espionage and keep tabs on its citizens (and non-citizens) abroad.
The NZZ investigations leads its reporters first to the letter boxes of a residential block of flats outside Lausanne where they find the name Arash Rezani. According to the article, Rezani came to Switzerland in 2011 to study for a PhD at the EPFL (the Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne). He has since become a Swiss citizen and works at an innovation centre on microtechnology.
But there’s more to Rezani than this dry professional resumé. On Telegram he used a photo of General Qassem Soleimani – who ran Iran’s undercover military operations until assassinated by the US in 2020 – as his own profile picture. His LinkedIn posts suggest a strong political affinity with Gaza. His wife is said to be the daughter of a professor who teaches at an Iranian university closely linked to the IRGC.
So far, so circumstantial.
But the plot thickens. While her name isn’t on the letter box, the daughter of an Alireza Zakani – a former presidential candidate, and current Mayor of Tehran – is registered as resident at the same Lausanne address. Her life in Switzerland was once a political liability for her father. NZZ notes an online broadcast he made in 2021 claiming his daughter had returned to Iran after completing her degree (also at the EPFL). The article suggests that isn’t correct: as of 2023 she was working for a Swiss technology company.
Another name crops up, that of Eshraf Madani, yet another EPFL graduate. Here, the evidence of direct personal links to the misdeeds of the Iranian regime, if not individual malfeasance, is clearer. Madani outed himself as a former member of the Basij militia – essentially the regime’s day-to-day volunteer enforcers – by signing a letter (in Iran) celebrating the anniversary of the Iranian revolution (including his EPFL affiliation). He now works at the same Swiss research centre as Rezani.
The article does not contend that any of these people have broken any Swiss laws. Links between members of any country’s elite living abroad are hardly surprising. Nonetheless, it notes the undoubted fact that “historically, technology transfer to Iran has taken place via scientists and engineers”. The nature of espionage operations is often precisely their opacity and deniability. The fact that there is such a cluster of individuals in Lausanne should, at the very least, raise questions. Civilian technologies often have military applications.
As if to show where all this might go, the NZZ cites the case of Mohammad Abedini Najafabadi, an EPFL graduate accused of smuggling electronic components to Iran under cover of various Swiss companies (including a start-up advised at one point by the local economic development agency) and his academic research (motion sensors for equestrian sports!) Having been arrested in Milan in December 2024, he was eventually returned to Iran on a plane linked to the Italian intelligence services, in what appears to have been a swap for an Italian journalist held by the Iranian authorities.
In recent years, the EPFL and another leading Swiss research university, ETH Zürich, have said to have beefed up their background checks on applicants from Iran and Russia. Some have been rejected on security grounds. The Swiss spy agency is doing the rounds of universities and companies talking about the risks of espionage.
But, as the article alludes, this may be only the tip of the iceberg. Transnational repression is a real phenomenon: whereby authoritarian regimes attempt to chill dissent abroad by using pro-regime members of the diaspora as “policemen”. It has been suggested that a Europe-wide rise in attacks on Jewish sites has been supported, indirectly, by Iranian regime agents. Switzerland’s spooks have warned of possible Iranian sabotage operations – something Russia has been doing in Europe for a while.
Again, NZZ offers no evidence anyone named in the article has been involved in any such activities. It doesn’t need to. The suggestion is enough.
The original article ‘Das Schweizer Schattennetz der iranischen Mullahs’ by Fabian Baumgartner, Florian Schoop and Jan Ludwig was first published in Germany by NZZ on March 31, 2026.
NZZ is a leading Swiss newspaper.
Summary by Charles Emmerson
