By Mike Brest. Media: Washingtonexaminer
The Department of Justice has filed charges against a Pakistani man who allegedly has ties to Iran with planning to hire hit men to carry out the assassination of unidentified U.S. government officials.
Asif Raza Merchant, 46, who is accused of trying to arrange a murder-for-hire scheme, was arrested on July 12, though the complaint was not unsealed until Tuesday. According to the FBI, his scheme is believed to be tied to Iranās repeated and public vow to get revenge against Trump administration officials who were involved with the January 2020 assassination of Iranian military leader Gen. Qassem Soleimani.
āFor years, the Justice Department has been working aggressively to counter Iranās brazen and unrelenting efforts to retaliate against American public officials for the killing of Iranian General Soleimani,ā Attorney General Merrick Garland said. āThe Justice Department will spare no resource to disrupt and hold accountable those who would seek to carry out Iranās lethal plotting against American citizens and will not tolerate attempts by an authoritarian regime to target American public officials and endanger Americaās national security.ā
Merchant, upon arriving in the United States in April, reached out to a person he believed could help carry out his plan, but that individual went to law enforcement and became a confidential informant. That informant later introduced Merchant to two purported hit men, who were actually undercover U.S. law enforcement officials.
In June, they met at a hotel in New York, where Merchant explained to the informant and then again when they met up with the hit men that he wanted them to steal documents or USB drives from the targetās home, planning a protest, and killing a government official.
Merchant allegedly paid the alleged hit men, actual undercover officers, $5,000 in cash as an advance deposit.
This is not the first arrest made as it relates to Iranās targeting of Trump administration officials involved in the Soleimani strike.
The Justice Department unsealed charges in August 2022 accusing Shahram Poursafi, an Iranian national and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps member, of attempting to arrange the murder of then-Trump national security adviser John Bolton. Poursafi was accused of agreeing to pay an informant $300,000 to kill him, and the Iranian noted he had an additional ājobā for the individual, which heād pay $1 million for the source to accomplish.
Recent intelligence of the Iranian threat toward Trump prompted the National Security Council to inform the Secret Service, though this threat stream is unrelated to the failed assassination attempt against the former president at a Butler, Pennsylvania, rally last month.
