US announces charges over alleged Iranian assassination plot

The foiled Trump assassination plot was allegedly orchestrated by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps to avenge the death of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in 2020 in a US attack ordered by then-President Trump, the Justice Department said.

Farhad Shakeri, 51, an Afghan national believed to be in Iran, was ordered by the IRGC to come up with a plan to kill Trump, the department said in a statement.

Shakeri and two other men, Carlisle Rivera, 49, and Jonathon Loadholt, 36, both of New York, were separately charged with plotting to kill an Iranian-American dissident in New York.

Rivera and Loadholt are both in US custody and appeared in court in New York on Thursday.

“The charges announced today expose Iran’s continued brazen efforts to target American citizens, including President-elect Donald Trump, other government leaders and dissidents who criticize the regime in Tehran,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray.

Trump, who defeated Vice President Kamala Harris in the US presidential elections on Tuesday, faced two separate assassination attempts this year, including a shooting at a campaign rally in which a bullet grazed his ear.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry on Saturday called allegations that Tehran was behind a plot against Trump “totally baseless.”

The State Department “rejects allegations that Iran is involved in an assassination attempt against former or current US officials,” spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said in a statement.

– ‘Network of criminal allies’ –

The US Department of Justice described suspect Shakeri as an “IRGC asset residing in Tehran.”

It says he immigrated to the United States as a child and was deported around 2008 after serving 14 years in prison for theft.

“In recent months, Shakeri has used a network of criminal associates he met in prison in the United States to provide the IRGC with operatives to monitor and assassinate IRGC targets,” the Justice Department said.

It says that Loadholt and Rivera, at Shakeri’s direction, spent months conducting surveillance on a U.S. citizen of Iranian descent who is an outspoken critic of the Iranian government and has been the target of multiple previous kidnapping and murder plots.

She was not identified in court documents but appears to be dissident journalist Masih Alinejad.

A Revolutionary Guard general was charged by U.S. prosecutors in late October in connection with a separate plot to kill Alinejad, who lives in New York.

– ‘Money is not a problem’ –

According to the indictment against Shakeri, he allegedly revealed the plot to assassinate Trump in telephone conversations with FBI agents in recent months.

Shakeri made the conversations with FBI agents because he hoped to get a reduced sentence for a person imprisoned in the United States, the report said.

Shakeri told the FBI that he was approached by an IRGC official in September about organizing Trump’s assassination.

He reportedly told the IRGC official that it would cost a “huge” amount of money, to which the official replied, “Money is not a problem.”

On October 7, Shakeri said he was asked to come up with a plan to kill Trump within seven days.

The IRGC official reportedly said that if Shakeri failed to come up with a plan within that time frame, the IRGC would try to kill Trump after the election because they estimated that he would lose and that it would be easier to to kill him after the elections.

The United States has repeatedly accused Iran of seeking to assassinate American officials in retaliation for Soleimani’s killing. Tehran has rejected the accusations.

A Pakistani man with alleged ties to Iran pleaded not guilty in New York earlier this year to charges that he tried to hire a hitman to kill an American politician or official.

The State Department also announced a $20 million reward for information leading to the capture of the alleged Iranian mastermind behind a plot to assassinate former White House official John Bolton.

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