Iran just got summoned by Germany over a plot to kill its top Jewish leader
2 hours ago · 19 October 2026Share
A room in the German Foreign Ministry building in Berlin, photographed in August 2019. File photo. Ernstol · CC BY-SA 4.0
Germany just called in Iran's ambassador.
This is about a plot to kill the country's top Jewish leader.
And it comes four days after a German court sentenced the two men who planned it.
So here's what happened. Germany's Foreign Ministry summoned the Iranian ambassador to the Federal Foreign Office earlier today. The ministry says it will not tolerate attacks on Jewish life in Germany.
The summons is a direct response to a verdict from the Hamburg Higher Regional Court four days ago. The court sentenced two men over a plot to kill Josef Schuster, President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, and Volker Beck, a former Bundestag member who now leads the German-Israeli Society.
A Danish national named Ali S., 54, got eight years and six months. He was found guilty of preparing an assassination and aggravated arson.
An Afghan national named Tawab M., 43, got four years and six months for his part in the plot.
And here's the part that matters most. The court says Ali S. was recruited by Iran's secret service and directed to carry out state-sponsored terrorism in Germany. Prosecutors say he worked for the intelligence arm of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. He kept close contact with the Quds Force, the unit that runs Iran's operations abroad.
That's a German court naming the IRGC and the Quds Force directly, in a verdict about a murder plot on German soil.
So what did these two men actually do? Prosecutors say Ali S. was tasked in early 2025 with gathering information on Schuster and Beck. He was also told to spy on two Jewish grocers in Berlin.
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The Iranian embassy building in Berlin. File photo. Mojiry · CC BY-SA 4.0
Tawab M. had agreed to help recruit a third man and supply him with a weapon to carry out the attack on Beck.
Both men were arrested in Denmark and sent to Germany. Ali S. in June 2025. Tawab M. in November 2025. German federal prosecutors charged them in May 2026. The verdicts can still be appealed.
Now, today's statement from the Foreign Ministry goes further than the verdict alone. It says the attempted attacks on Schuster and Beck will have legal consequences. And it says Germany had already pushed for the EU to list the masterminds behind Iranian assassination plots worldwide, and the IRGC itself, as terrorist entities. It says that push succeeded.
But here's the thing. This is not the first time Germany has summoned Iran's ambassador over this exact case. It did it once before, in July 2025, right after Ali S. was arrested. Today's summons is a second, separate step. This time it comes after the men have actually been convicted and sentenced.
Volker Beck, one of the two men the plot targeted, spoke after the sentencing. He said the trial showed how Iran exports its terror to Germany. He is now renewing his call for the Iranian ambassador to be thrown out of the country.
That's Beck's own demand. It is not German government policy. The Foreign Ministry has summoned the ambassador. It has not said whether it will expel him.
Iran's embassy in Berlin denies all of it. It calls the allegations unfounded and dangerous.
And this case does not sit on its own. It lands eight months into a war between Israel, America and Iran, a war that has since widened into a separate conflict between Saudi Arabia and Yemen's Iran-aligned Houthis. A German court has now put Iran's intelligence services at the centre of a plot against Jewish life in Germany itself, in the middle of that wider war.
Germany says the ambassador has been summoned. The Foreign Ministry says there will be legal consequences. Whether anything happens beyond today's meeting at the Foreign Office is not known yet.
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