Federal authorities are charging a Natick man and an Iranian man in connection with a deadly drone strike abroad

Federal officials announced charges Monday against two men for violating U.S. export laws to supply Iran with materials for a drone strike that killed U.S. soldiers in Jordan earlier this year.

U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Joshua Levy outlined the charges against Mahdi Mohammad Sadeghi, a naturalized U.S. citizen living in Natick, and Mohammad Abedininajafabadi, an Iranian national arrested in Milan, Italy.

Levy said the two had conspired since 2016 to violate American export laws by supplying sensitive American technology to Iran. Sadeghi works for a US semiconductor company based in Massachusetts. Abedininajafabadi is the chief executive of a Tehran-based company with ties to the Iranian military, government and the IRGC, which the US considers a terrorist organization.

Both are accused of conspiring to violate U.S. export laws; Abedininajafabadi was also charged with conspiracy to provide material support to a terrorist organization.

Federal officials want to extradite Abedininajafabadi from Italy to face charges in the United States

“As alleged in this criminal complaint, the serious potential harm arose from the transfer of American technology abroad,” Levy said Monday evening at the Moakley Federal Courthouse in Boston.

Abedininajafabadi’s company is said to have manufactured the navigation system used in the drone attack.

According to a LinkedIn profile with his name, Sadeghi has been an employee at Analog Devices Inc. (ADI) in Wilmington since 2020. When asked about its employee and the allegations, the company issued a statement to WBUR:

“ADI takes its compliance obligations and its role in national security very seriously,” Ferda Millan said of its external communications. “We have cooperated fully with federal law enforcement and will continue to do so throughout the process. ADI is committed to preventing unauthorized access to and misuse of our products and technologies.”

According to ADI’s website, Sadeghi received his Ph.D. He received his degree in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2014. His thesis was on unmanned aerial vehicles.

The LinkedIn profile shows a Sadeghi with the title of product marketing manager of a technology group focused on the development, manufacturing and validation of microelectronic mechanical systems.

The drone attack in northeast Jordan on the military outpost known as Tower 22 in January 2024 killed three US soldiers and injured more than 47 soldiers.

U.S. officials blamed the attack on the Islamic Resistance of Iraq, an umbrella group of Iranian-backed militias that includes Kataib Hezbollah.

Three Georgia soldiers – Sgt. William Jerome Rivers of Carrollton, Sgt. Breonna Moffett of Savannah and Sgt. Kennedy Sanders of Waycross – were killed in an attack.

The disposable attack drone may have been mistaken for a US drone that was scheduled to return to the logistics base around the same time and was not shot down. Instead, it crashed into living quarters, killing the three soldiers and injuring more than 40.

There were around 350 US military personnel in Tower 22 at the time. It is strategically located between Jordan and Syria, just 6 miles from the Iraqi border, and in the months immediately following Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s violent response in Gaza, Iranian-backed militias increased their attacks on US -Military locations in the region.

Following the attack, the US launched a massive counterstrike against 85 sites in Iraq and Syria used by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Iranian-backed militias and reinforced Tower 22’s defenses.

With reporting by Amy Gorel and Christine Willmsen of WBUR and The Associated Press

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story used a Justice Department-shortened version of Abedininajafabadi’s name.

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