A man is on the run after an Iranian plot to assassinate president-elect Donald Trump was thwarted by the FBI, the US government said.
Two men, Carlisle Rivera and Jonathan Loadholt, have been arrested in New York, while a third suspect, Farhad Shakeri, is hiding in Iran’s capital of Tehran.
They have all been charged with being hired to kill the Republican ahead of the presidential elections in which he faced vice president Kamala Harris.
The Justice Department unsealed the criminal charges against the three, revealing that Shakeri was an asset of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in the US.
A criminal complaint filed in federal court in Manhattan alleges that an unnamed official in the IRGC instructed a contact this past September to put together a plan to surveil and ultimately murder Trump.
It is alleged that if the man, identified as Shakeri, was unable to create a plan by then, the official told him Iran would pause its plan until after the presidential election because the official believed Trump would lose and it would be easier to assassinate him then.
Shakeri told the FBI he did not plan to propose a plan to murder Trump within the seven days the official had requested, according to the complaint.
The plot, with the charges unsealed just days after Trump’s defeat of Harris, reflects what federal officials have described as ongoing efforts by by Iran to target US government officials, including Trump, on US soil.
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