US officials say Donald Trump has been the focus of repeated assassination plots by Iranian-linked operatives on American soil over at least five years, with federal court documents outlining how 'kill teams' were allegedly recruited, funded and directed to murder the former president and other senior politicians.
Iran's leadership has sought revenge on Donald Trump since he ordered the 2020 drone strike in Baghdad that killed Major General Qasem Soleimani, a powerful commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC.
According to document cited in US court filings, one of the most detailed plots involved an Afghan-born man named Farhad Shakeri, who had lived in the United States, spent 14 years in prison there and was later deported. From Tehran, where he was based, Shakeri allegedly spoke to the FBI by phone and set out how he was instructed by his IRGC handlers to assemble a team to assassinate Donald Trump.
Court documents say Shakeri was told to find US-based hitmen and come up with a plan to kill Trump on 7 October 2024, while he was still on the campaign trail. When Shakeri warned that the operation would cost a 'huge' amount of money, an IRGC official allegedly replied that 'we have already spent a lot of money ... so the money's not an issue'.
Papers from the trials of the alleged hitmen state that Shakeri understood the comment to mean the IRGC had already spent a 'significant sum' on attempts to murder Trump and was prepared to keep pouring money into the project.
He was also told he had just seven days to carry out the operation. If he failed within that window, Shakeri told the FBI his handler said the plan would be paused until after the 2024 election, because they believed Trump would lose and 'afterward, it would be easier to assassinate' him.
Shakeri claimed he turned to his criminal contacts from his time in US prisons, recruiting two New Yorkers, Carlisle 'Pop' Rivera and Jonathan Loadholt, as contract killers. The pair were initially promised $100,000 (£74,608) to eliminate a different target, an anti-regime activist, according to the same records. They were arrested before they could act.
Rivera was convicted of murder-for-hire and sentenced in January to 15 years in prison. Loadholt has also been found guilty and is due to be sentenced, with no date given. Shakeri himself has been charged in absentia with murder-for-hire, but remains in Iran.
The alleged plot directed by Shakeri is only one strand of what officials and analysts say has been a campaign of targeted violence. Yigal Carmon, a retired colonel in the Israel Defense Forces and terrorism expert quoted in the reporting, described the Iranian operatives as acting 'like the mafia'.
In his words, 'They have a list of the people they want dead and they have dispatched many of their spies to arrange to kill them.'
Source: International Business Times UK
