The stabbing of a journalist in London was a planned attack ordered by a third party acting on behalf of the Iranian state, a court has heard.

Pouria Zeraati, a British journalist of Iranian origin, had worked for Iran International, a Farsi-language dissident broadcaster, when he was stabbed in the leg outside his west London home in 2024.

Nandito Badea, 21, and George Stana, 25, from Romania, sat with their heads bent towards interpreters as Duncan Atkinson KC, prosecuting, opened the trial on Monday in London.

Both deny charges of wounding with intent and unlawful wounding. A third man accused of involvement, David Andrei, was arrested in Romania but is not involved in the trial.

“This was no robbery, no fight that got out of control, rather it was deliberate, planned violence to achieve what it did, that is serious injury to its target,” Atkinson told the court.

He said they had deliberately targeted Zeraati, whose channel’s opposition coverage and Saudi backing led Tehran to designate it as a terrorist organisation in 2022.

They had committed a “planned attack preceded by reconnaissance which was ordered by a third party acting on behalf of the Iranian state” and intended to cause Zeraati “really serious harm”, he said.

The Iranian chargé d’affaires in the UK, who serves as the head of the country’s diplomatic mission, has previously denied any link between Tehran and the attack on Zeraati.

Atkinson told the court that since 2005 Iran had “turned less to its own operatives and increasingly to use proxies such as criminal gangs … This has included attacks on persons in this country who have become targets of Iranian intimidation”.

Jurors were told of state controls on the press and the harassment of journalists outside Iran, and were shown an image of posters put up in Tehran in 2022 that featured a number of journalists including Zeraati with the words “wanted: dead or alive”.

“Mr Zeraati was therefore transparently a target of the regime close to the relevant time,” Atkinson told the court.

According to the prosecution, on the day of the attack, Badea and Andrei confronted Zeraati as he crossed the street between his home and his car. The court heard that Andrei had held him while Badea stabbed him three times in the leg before they fled to a nearby Mcar, where a driver was waiting.

The court heard the vehicle had subsequently been dumped, along with clothing, and that the accused had left in a taxi to Heathrow.

The court also heard that police had arrested Stana outside Zeraati’s address a year before the attack. He had been in the property’s communal garden with another man, and was allegedly found in possession of a pair of gloves and scissors and wearing a blue medical mask.

Atkinson said the UK had historically been less targeted than other countries, but that had changed in recent times. Iran International was previously based in Chiswick before relocating to the US after mounting threats from Tehran and concerns about its journalists’ safety.

The trial continues.