US arrests man with ties to Iran for ‘plotting to assassinate Trump’

Asif Raza Merchant’s alleged murder-for-hire plot was ‘straight out of the Iranian playbook’, says FBI director

A Pakistani man with ties to Iran has been arrested for allegedly plotting to assassinate a US official in retaliation for the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) commander, the US justice department said.
Asif Raza Merchant, 46, allegedly sought to hire a hitman to assassinate a politician or a US government official in the United States, the department said in a statement.
“For years, the justice department has been working aggressively to counter Iran’s brazen and unrelenting efforts to retaliate against American public officials for the killing of Iranian General Soleimani,” Merrick Garland, the Attorney General, said.
Trump ordered the strike in Baghdad while president. He is not named in the indictment but it was unsealed weeks after it was announced that an Iran-linked threat against the former president caused officials to boost his security.
Soleimani, the architect of Iran’s foreign military operations, was killed in a US drone strike in Baghdad in January 2020. Iranian officials have repeatedly vowed to take “revenge” for the killing.
“The Justice Department will spare no resource to disrupt and hold accountable those who would seek to carry out Iran’s lethal plotting against American citizens,” Mr Garland said.
The attorney general said no evidence has emerged to link Merchant with the July 13 assassination attempt against the former president in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Christopher Wary, the FBI director, said the Pakistani national had “close ties to Iran” and that the alleged murder-for-hire plot was “straight out of the Iranian playbook.”
Another FBI official said the assassins Merchant allegedly tried to hire were in fact undercover FBI agents.
Merchant was arrested on July 12 as he planned to leave the country.
Mumtaz Zahra Baloch, the spokesman for Pakistan’s foreign ministry, said in a statement that the government was in touch with US authorities over the matter.
In August 2022, the United States charged a member of the IRGC with plotting to assassinate John Bolton, the former US national security advisor.
The justice department said Shahram Poursafi, who remains at large, had offered to pay an individual in the United States $300,000 to kill Bolton.
Iran has dismissed the claim that it had plotted to kill Bolton as “fiction”.