From a jail in New York, a commander of an Iranian terrorist proxy group helped direct a failed plot to attack a key UK Air Force base used by the US to execute the war with Iran, federal prosecutors allege in a new indictment.

The man, Mohammad Dawood Al-Saadi, a dual Iranian and Iraqi citizen, is accused of using coded messages in calls to his family to give instructions to two other people who attempted to help carry out the attack on the base, RAF Fairford, where US B-1 bombers were stationed.

Al-Saadi, who is associated with Kataib Hezbollah, was already in jail when he began to coordinate the attack, prosecutors said. He was arrested earlier this year on a host of charges around his alleged involvement in terrorist plots in the US and attacks in Europe, and was being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center, a federal jail in Brooklyn, New York.