Two charged in connection with Iran drone strike that killed 3 US troops in the Middle East

BOSTON (AP) — Two men, including a dual Iranian American citizen, have been arrested on charges that they exported sensitive technology to Iran that was used in a drone attack in Jordan that killed three American troops early this year and injured dozens of other service members, the Justice Department said Monday.

The criminal case in federal court in Massachusetts charges the men, identified as Mahdi Mohammad Sadeghi and Mohammad Abedininajafabadi, with export control violations.

U.S. officials blamed the January attack on the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella group of Iran-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 the Jan. 28 drone attack on a U.S. outpost in northeastern Jordan called Tower 22.

In the attack, the one-way attack drone may have been mistaken for a U.S. drone that was expected to return back to the logistics base about the same time and was not shot down.

Instead, it crashed into living quarters, killing the three soldiers and injuring more than 40.

Tower 22 held about 350 U.S. military personnel at the time. It is strategically located between Jordan and Syria, only 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the Iraqi border, and in the months just after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, and Israel’s blistering response in Gaza, Iranian-backed militias intensified their attacks on U.S. military locations in the region.

Following the attack, the U.S. launched a huge counterstrike against 85 sites in Iraq and Syria used by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and Iranian-backed militia and bolstered Tower 22’s defenses.

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Tucker and Copp reported from Washington.