Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps sought to hire a network of U.S.-based criminal convicts to kill President-elect Donald Trump, in addition to other targets including Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejad and two other New Yorkers.
The murder-for-hire scheme was revealed in court documents unsealed today in Manhattan. The Justice Department said two of the defendants were arrested in New York City and a third remains at large in Iran.
Iran’s threats against Trump began after the 2020 drone strike that killed IRGC general Qassem Soleimani, the head of the guards’ Quds Force. In August, the Justice Department arrested a Pakistani man believed to have plotted political assassinations, reportedly including against Trump.
The Iranian regime has also attempted to arrange the assassination of top U.S. officials who worked in Trump’s administration, including former national-security adviser John Bolton.
“The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — a designated foreign terrorist organization — has been conspiring with criminals and hitmen to target and gun down Americans on U.S. soil and that simply won’t be tolerated,” FBI director Christopher Wray said in a statement today. “Thanks to the hard work of the FBI, their deadly schemes were disrupted.”
The court filings described Farhad Shakeri, an Iranian asset who lives in Tehran, as the leader of a network of U.S.-based criminal agents whom the IRGC would pay for the successful murder of its targets. According to the criminal complaint, Shakeri immigrated to the U.S. from Afghanistan as a child, was imprisoned in New York State for 14 years on a robbery conviction, and was deported in 2008.
He allegedly hired the other two defendants, Jonathan Loadholt and Carlisle Rivera, both of whom he met in prison, to surveil Alinejad, with the goal ultimately to kill her. They were both arrested in New York on Thursday.
In telephone interviews with the FBI, Shakeri admitted to his role in plotting the murder-for-hire plots after a series of conversations with an official from the IRGC, who was not charged.
Shakeri claimed that he met the IRGC official, whom he said identified himself with the last name “Soleimani,” over a dozen times. During a meeting in September, the official reportedly ordered him to focus on targeting Trump and to pause all of the other assassination plots.
“We have already spent a lot of money . . . so the money’s not an issue,” the IRGC official allegedly told Shakeri after he said that a plot targeting Trump would be expensive.
Then, in a meeting last month, Shakeri told the FBI, the IRGC official tasked him with putting together a plan to kill Trump within seven days.
Shakeri further claimed that the IRGC official told him that if he could not put together a plan within that time frame, the Revolutionary Guard would pause their assassination plots because he believed that Trump would lose the election and that it would be easier to assassinate him afterward.
Shakeri also claimed, in the FBI interview, that he did not intend to put forward a plan by the end of the seven-day deadline. In the court filing today, the Justice Department said that while some of Shakeri’s comments to the FBI appeared to be false, “certain of SHAKERI’s statements appear to be truthful.”
Most of the criminal complaint focused on the Shakeri-coordinated plot to surveil a house in Brooklyn that the network linked to Alinejad and ultimately kill her.
Alinejad is a prominent journalist and dissident who left Iran and received U.S. citizenship. The Justice Department has previously brought charges in two separate plots that targeted her.
The FBI said there were indications that the IRGC had commissioned other plots to kill her. Shakeri told the FBI that the IRGC official said his team would need to provide video evidence that they killed Alinejad in order to receive payment for the assassination, therefore suggesting that there were other active plots against her.
The identities of two additional targets, described in the court papers as “two Jewish American citizens residing in New York City,” is unknown. Shakeri claimed in his FBI interview that the IRGC offered $500,000 for the murder of each individual. The filing also revealed the Shakeri network’s role in planning a terrorist attack targeting Israeli tourists in Sri Lanka. It was thwarted by the authorities there.