Media reports said at least ten wanted suspects are members of Iran’s notorious Quds Brigades responsible for assassinations both within and beyond their homeland against regime critics.

Focus Magazine reported that hit teams from the Iranian secret intelligence service Vevak were also targeted in the raids in Bavaria, Baden-Wuerttemberg and North Rhine-Westphalia.

The government said “elaborate observations” by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the domestic German intelligence agency, led to Tuesday’s swoops.

In September 1992, Iranian hitmen murdered four Iranian exile politicians in the Berlin restaurant Mykonos. In the ensuing investigation it was proved that Iran's Secret Service had issued the assassination order.

This time Israeli and Jewish interests are understood to have been the target.

The Public Prosecutor General in Karlsruhe, Baden-Wuerttemberg said that no arrests had been made.

A prosecution spokesman said the suspects are said to have spied on institutions and people in Germany by order of "an intelligence unit thought to belong to Iran”.

Additional reporting by Monika Pallenberg