14 Jul 2026
Exclusive findings from a Channel 4 News investigation come as the UK designates Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a threat to national security under a new law to tackle attacks on UK soil.
Former senior members of the IRGC and the affiliated Basij paramilitary group are living in the UK despite being found by courts to have been complicit in crimes against humanity.
A Channel 4 News investigation found Akbar Azimi-Rad, 42, pictured below, running a butcher shop in the north of England. He was formerly a commander of the Basij, the brutal volunteer force under the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps used to control and suppress dissidents in Iran.
Others who have settled in the UK include a female former deputy governor of a prison in Iran found by UK courts to have made “a substantial contribution” to torture and a male IRGC guard who was “responsible for guarding prisoners, kept naked in small dark cells and tortured”.