A Pakistani man has been arrested by US authorities for allegedly plotting to kill a US official as part of a plan to exact revenge for the murder of Iranian Revolutionary Guards Commander Qassem Soleimani.
The US Justice Department said on Tuesday that 46-year-old Asif Raza Merchant had been arrested for allegedly attempting to hire a hitman to assassinate a politician or US government official in the US.
FBI Director Christopher Wary said Merchant had "close ties to Iran" and that the plot to hire a hitman was "straight out of the Iranian playbook."
Other FBI officials said the hitmen Merchant allegedly tried to hire were undercover FBI agents and that he was arrested on July 12 as he planned to flee the country.
US Attorney General Merrick Garland said that they had been working for years to counter Iranian efforts to mount a retaliatory attack to exact revenge for the drone strike which killed Soleimani in Iraq in January 2020. Soleimani commanded Iran's foreign military operations, including those mounted in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere in the region, including liaising attacks with groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, and Houthis in Yemen.
"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," Garland said.
While Garland did not identify the intended victim of Merchant's efforts, he clarified that they had found no evidence that links the Pakistani national with the assassination attempt on former US president Donald Trump at an election rally in Pennsylvania in July.
US officials had charged Shahram Poursafi, an alleged member of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, in August 2022 for allegedly offering to pay $300,000 to a hitman to assassinate former US National Security Advisor John Bolton.
The Justice Department said Poursafi managed to flee and remains at large.
Iran, meanwhile, dismissed the accusation as "fiction".
On July 13, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, armed with an AR-styled rifle had fired at Trump during a rally in Pennsylvania. A registered Republican voter, he suffered from depression. Soon after he opened fire at Trump, secret service agents shot him dead.