US prosecutors on Friday announced charges in an alleged Iranian plot to assassinate US president-elect Donald Trump and a prominent dissident Iranian-American journalist.
The foiled assassination plot on Trump was allegedly directed by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to avenge the death of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in 2020 in a US strike ordered by then-president Trump, the US Department of Justice said.
Farhad Shakeri, 51, an Afghan national who is believed to be in Iran, was “tasked” by the IRGC with providing a plan to kill Trump, the department said in a statement.
Photo: Reuters
Shakeri and two other men, Carlisle Rivera, 49, and Jonathon Loadholt, 36, both of New York, were charged separately with plotting to kill an Iranian-American dissident in New York.
Rivera and Loadholt are in US custody and made a court appearance in New York on Thursday.
“The charges announced today expose Iran’s continued brazen attempts to target US citizens, including president-elect Donald Trump, other government leaders and dissidents who criticize the regime in Tehran,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said.
Trump, who defeated US Vice President Kamala Harris in Tuesday’s US presidential election, faced two other separate assassination attempts this year, including a shooting at a campaign rally when a bullet grazed his ear.
Iran’s foreign ministry yesterday called the allegations that Tehran was behind a plot against Trump “totally unfounded.”
The foreign ministry “rejects allegations that Iran is implicated in an assassination attempt targeting former or current American officials,” spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said in a statement.
The department described suspect Shakeri as an “IRGC asset residing in Tehran.”
It said Loadholt and Rivera, at Shakeri’s direction, spent months conducting surveillance of a US citizen of Iranian origin who is an outspoken critic of the Iranian government and has been the target of multiple prior kidnapping and murder plots.
She was not identified in court documents, but appears to be dissident journalist Masih Alinejad.
According to the criminal complaint against Shakeri, he allegedly disclosed the plot to assassinate Trump in telephone conversations with FBI agents in recent months.
Shakeri held the conversations with FBI agents, because he was hoping to obtain a sentence reduction for a person who is imprisoned in the US, it said.
Shakeri told the FBI he was approached by an IRGC official in September about organizing the assassination of Trump.
He allegedly told the IRGC official it would cost a “huge” amount of money, to which the official responded that “money’s not an issue.”
On Oct. 7, Shakeri said he was asked to come up with a plan to kill Trump within seven days.
The IRGC official allegedly said that if Shakeri was unable to come up with a plan in that timeframe, the IRGC would seek to kill Trump after the election, because it assessed he would lose and it would be easier to assassinate him after the vote.
The US has repeatedly accused Iran of seeking to assassinate US officials in retaliation for the killing of Soleimani.
Tehran has rejected the accusations.
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