Federal prosecutors have charged Asif Merchant, a Pakistani citizen with alleged ties to Iran, with the murder of a U.S. politician or government official.
Image courtesy of the Ministry of Justice
A Pakistani national with ties to Iran has been charged with plotting a failed assassination attempt on U.S. government officials on American soil, the U.S. Justice Department said on Tuesday.
A senior law enforcement source told NBC News that former President Donald Trump was one of the potential targets of the plot by Asif Merchant, who was arrested in Texas on July 12 , before any attack can be carried out.
Merchant’s arrest came a day after Trump was nearly killed at a presidential campaign rally when a would-be assassin on a nearby rooftop shot the Republican candidate as he spoke on stage.
According to NBC, law enforcement officials do not believe Merchant’s alleged conspiracy is related to the assassination attempt on Trump at a Pennsylvania rally.
According to a report by NBC News in mid-July, the Secret Service recently increased its protection for Trump after U.S. officials learned that Iran was plotting to assassinate Trump. Security for the former president was increased ahead of the rally shooting.
Businessman, 46, hatched an elaborate plot kill government officials since at least April, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a criminal complaint unsealed Tuesday afternoon in federal court in Brooklyn, New York.
He spent some time in Iran and then flew to the United States, where he contacted an unnamed person who he believed could help him implement his plan.
But that person reported Merchant to law enforcement and became a confidential source.
Court documents say the source put Merchant in touch with two “hit men,” who were actually undercover police officers.
The criminal complaint alleges that the businessman paid the men $5,000 in cash in New York as a down payment for the murder of the officers.
“For years, the Department of Justice has been aggressively responding to Iran’s blatant and callous retaliation for the killing of Iranian General Soleimani by U.S. public officials,” the attorney general said. Merrick Garland said in a news release announcing the murder-for-hire case.
Soleimani was Iran’s most powerful general at the time and was killed in a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad, Iraq, in January 2020.
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