Two ten-member kidnapping networks that simulated police identity to abduct businessmen’s sons for ransoms up to $200,000 have been dismantled by Tehran criminal investigators, Iranian authorities announced. According to Colonel Morteza Nasari, deputy chief of the capital’s serious-crime division, one gang held two victims for 15 days in a disused grain silo after snatching them off a road near a southern industrial zone. The detainees were rescued before any payment was made. In separate operations, a second group that had already extorted $350,000 in cryptocurrency from two families in Pakdasht for the release of captives was captured along with nine alleged members, police said. Investigators recovered firearms, ammunition, and vehicles used in the crimes.

A parallel crackdown targeted armed robberies of jewellery stores and private homes. A man driving a black Arrizo saloon was arrested for two heists of gold shops in east and north Tehran during early May, in which he brandished a pistol and stole roughly 4 billion Iranian tomans in gold; his sister, residing in a northern province, was detained for selling the loot. In Semnan, a home-invasion gunman was caught and the gold returned to the owner, while in Rudbar-e Jonub three men were jailed for a similar break-in. A high-profile attempt to prise open a safe storing an estimated 200 billion tomans of gold and gems inside a northern Tehran company failed when the thieves could not breach it, although an employee’s brother has been arrested as an alleged accomplice.

The purge extended to street violence. Two men armed with a machete and a knife were taken into custody after igniting a brawl that spread from Tehran’s Nizamabad neighbourhood into adjoining districts during Ashura commemorations; judicial orders sent them straight to prison. The rash of robberies and abductions triggered intensive surveillance, with Nasari pledging to pursue remaining suspects.

Elsewhere, the public prosecutor at Bir Mourad Raïs, near Algiers, announced the detention of a man filmed threatening shopkeepers with a large knife while stealing daily takings in a single-day spree; he was remanded in custody ahead of trial. In São Paulo, Brazil, police are hunting two armed men who grabbed a 49-year-old woman from the car park of a beauty salon, forced her into her Jeep Renegade, and robbed her of 20,000 reais in jewellery plus a transferred 2,900 reais before freeing her unharmed on a motorway. No link is alleged between the international incidents, but they illustrate a pattern of daylight violent crime that has prompted police action across three continents. Investigations in all jurisdictions remain active.