A federal jury in Brooklyn needed less than two hours to find Asif Raza Merchant guilty, the same man who had already told the court under oath that he came to the United States on behalf of Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard to arrange the killing of a sitting American president.
The verdict, delivered on March 6, 2026, came as US airstrikes on Tehran were still active. TheUS Department of Justice press releaseconfirmed Merchant was convicted on two counts, murder for hire and attempting to commit an act of terrorism transcending national boundaries. He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.
Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in her official statement that Merchant 'landed on American soil hoping to kill President Trump; instead, he was met with the might of American law enforcement.'
Asif Raza Merchant is a 47-year-old Pakistani national whose professional life, by his own courtroom account, spanned banking, failed banana exports, car sales and his uncle's garment trade. He has two wives, one Pakistani and one Iranian, whom he met on a religious pilgrimage to Karbala in Iraq, and five children. He periodically visited the United States on business, access that, according toDOJ trial exhibits, made him valuable to Iranian intelligence.
Merchant testified that his cousin Husnain introduced him to an officer ofIran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the powerful paramilitary branch of Iran's military, designated as a foreign terrorist organisation by the United States, in late 2022 or early 2023. That officer, whom Merchant named as Mehrdad Yousef, gave him training in countersurveillance and espionage tradecraft over a series of meetings in Tehran. 'He asked me if I was interested in doing some work with the Iranian government, and I said yes,' Merchant testified, according to multiplecourt reports. He acknowledged on the stand that he knew the IRGC was a designated terrorist organisation at the time he agreed to work for it.
The motive driving the IRGC's interest in American targets traces directly to Jan. 3, 2020, when a US drone strike ordered by Trump killed General Qassem Soleimani, head of the IRGC's overseas Quds Force, at Baghdad International Airport. Iranian officials vowed publicly and repeatedly to avenge Soleimani's death.
TheOffice of the Director of National Intelligencepublished a report in November 2024 noting that Iranian security services directed plots through surrogate networks, 'often including third-country individuals with access to the United States, to try to maintain some level of deniability.' Merchant was, by his own admission, exactly that type of surrogate.
In 2023, Merchant's IRGC handler sent him to the United States on an initial assignment to scout for potential IRGC recruits willing to remain in the country long term. By 2024, his instructions had escalated significantly. According to theDOJ's account of the trial evidence, Merchant arrived in April 2024 with a three‑part operational mission: to steal documents or USB drives from a target's home, stage disruptive protests at political rallies and arrange the killing of a senior American political figure or government official.
To find someone capable of carrying out those tasks, Merchant contacted a New York acquaintance named Nadeem Ali. Ali, rather than helping him, immediately reported the approach to law enforcement and became a confidential informant. When Merchant met Ali in early June 2024 to explain the scheme, he made a 'finger gun' gesture with his hand to indicate the job involved a killing.
Ali arranged for Merchant to meet two men he described as organised crime contacts. Those men were, in fact, undercover FBI agents. Prosecutors showed jurors video of Merchant sketching out an assassination scenario on a napkin during one of those meetings.
Source: International Business Times UK
