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.
UNITED: The premier said Trump’s tariff comments provided a great opportunity for the private and public sectors to come together to maintain the nation’s chip advantage The government is considering ways to assist the nation’s semiconductor industry or hosting collaborative projects with the private sector after US President Donald Trump threatened to impose a 100 percent tariff on chips exported to the US, Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) said yesterday. Trump on Monday told Republican members of the US Congress about plans to impose sweeping tariffs on semiconductors, steel, aluminum, copper and pharmaceuticals “in the very near future.” “It’s time for the United States to return to the system that made us richer and more powerful than ever before,” Trump said at the Republican Issues Conference in Miami, Florida. “They
GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY: Taiwan must capitalize on the shock waves DeepSeek has sent through US markets to show it is a tech partner of Washington, a researcher said China’s reported breakthrough in artificial intelligence (AI) would prompt the US to seek a stronger alliance with Taiwan and Japan to secure its technological superiority, a Taiwanese researcher said yesterday. The launch of low-cost AI model DeepSeek (深度求索) on Monday sent US tech stocks tumbling, with chipmaker Nvidia Corp losing 16 percent of its value and the NASDAQ falling 612.46 points, or 3.07 percent, to close at 19,341.84 points. On the same day, the Philadelphia Stock Exchange Semiconductor Sector index dropped 488.7 points, or 9.15 percent, to close at 4,853.24 points. The launch of the Chinese chatbot proves that a competitor can
TAIWAN DEFENSE: The initiative would involve integrating various systems in a fast-paced manner through the use of common software to obstruct a Chinese invasion The first tranche of the US Navy’s “Replicator” initiative aimed at obstructing a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be ready by August, a US Naval Institute (USNI) News report on Tuesday said. The initiative is part of a larger defense strategy for Taiwan, and would involve launching thousands of uncrewed submarines, surface vessels and aerial vehicles around Taiwan to buy the nation and its partners time to assemble a response. The plan was first made public by the Washington Post in June last year, when it cited comments by US Indo-Pacific Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue
MARITIME SECURITY: Of the 52 vessels, 15 were rated a ‘threat’ for various reasons, including the amount of time they spent loitering near subsea cables, the CGA said Taiwan has identified 52 “suspicious” Chinese-owned ships flying flags of convenience that require close monitoring if detected near the nation, the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) said yesterday, as the nation seeks to protect its subsea telecoms cables. The stricter regime comes after a Cameroon-flagged vessel was briefly detained by the CGA earlier this month on suspicion of damaging an international cable northeast of Taiwan. The vessel is owned by a Hong Kong-registered company with a Chinese address given for its only listed director, the CGA said previously. Taiwan fears China could sever its communication links as part of an attempt
RSS