NOS News•today, 10:54 PM
Three people have been charged in the United States on suspicion of plotting to assassinate Donald Trump on behalf of Iran.
Two Americans have been arrested, the third suspect, Farhad Shakeri, is probably in Iran, American media write. The US Department of Justice claims that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) asked Shakeri to prepare an assassination plan.
That had to happen before the presidential elections. It would be revenge for the US assassination of Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander Qassem Soleimani in 2020. He was killed in a US drone strike in Baghdad. Trump was president of the United States at the time. Iran immediately said that it wanted to avenge the attack on Soleimani.
Shakeri is from Afghanistan and came to the United States as a child. After years of imprisonment, he was deported from the country by the Americans in 2008. According to prosecutors, Shakeri knew the two other suspects from his time in prison. He is said to have hired them before to attack an Iranian-American activist.
American elections
The Revolutionary Guards reportedly asked him in October to make an assassination plan within a week. If that were not successful within that short time, the plan would be postponed beyond the elections. The Iranians assumed that Trump would lose the election and that it would be easier to kill him afterwards.
The information comes from Shakeri himself. The indictment alleges that he revealed the plans in a series of phone conversations with the FBI. He said he helped to obtain a lower prison sentence for someone else detained in the US.
Although the FBI ruled that some of the information he provided was incorrect, his statements about a plot to assassinate Trump were judged to be reliable.
