According to the Department of Justice, the United States charged an Iranian man on Friday in connection with a rumored plot to kill President-elect Donald Trump that Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards Corps allegedly ordered.
Law enforcement said in a statement that Farhad Shakeri told them “that he was tasked on October 7, 2024, with providing a plan to kill” Trump. According to the report, Shakeri told police that he had no intention of creating such a plan in the time frame that the IRGC had specified.
Esmail Baghaei, a spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, said in a statement reported by Iranian media on Saturday that the accusation was part of a “repulsive” plot by Israel and Iranian opposition leaders abroad to “complicate matters between America and Iran.”
Shakeri, 51, is a Revolutionary Guard asset who lives in Tehran, according to the DOJ. The DOJ claimed that Shakeri, who immigrated to the US as a child, faced deportation in 2008 following his robbery conviction. According to prosecutors, Shakeri remains at large and is believed to be in Iran.
Shakeri also accused Carlisle Rivera and Jonathan Loadholt, two New Yorkers he had met while incarcerated, of aiding Shakeri in his plot to murder a US citizen of Iranian descent in New York who was a vocal opponent of Iran’s regime and had previously been the target of murder.
It fit the description of Masih Alinejad, a journalist and activist who has criticized Iran’s headcovering laws for women, though prosecutors did not name the target. In 2022, authorities detained a man carrying a rifle outside her residence, and in 2021, they charged four Iranians with plotting her kidnapping.
We placed Loadholt and Rivera under arrest pending trial. When asked for comment, their solicitors did not immediately reply.
