WASHINGTON (AP) – The Justice Department on Friday revealed an Iranian murder plot to kill Donald Trumpcharging a man who said he was instructed by a government official before this week’s election to plot the assassination of the Republican president-elect.

Investigators were tipped off about the plot to kill Trump by Farhad Shakeri, an accused Iranian government asset who has served time in US prisons for robbery and who authorities say maintains a network of criminal associates enlisted by Tehran for surveillance and plots of murder for hire.

Shakeri told the FBI that a contact in Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard instructed him last September to drop other work he was doing and come up with a plan within seven days to surveil and eventually kill him kill Trump, according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court in Manhattan. .

The official was quoted by Shakeri as saying that “I have already spent a lot of money” and that “money is not a problem”. Shakeri told investigators that the official told him that if he couldn’t come up with a plan within seven days, then the plot would be shelved until after the election because the official assumed Trump would lose and it would be easier to kill him then. , the complaint said.

Shakeri is at large and remains in Iran. Two other men were arrested on charges that the Shakers had recruited them to stalk and kill them prominent Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejadwhich endured several Iranian assassination plots thwarted by law enforcement.

“I’m very shocked,” Alinejad said by phone to The Associated Press from Berlin, where she was about to attend a ceremony marking the anniversary of the fall of the wall. “This is the third attempt against me and it’s shocking.”

In a post on social media platform X, she said: “I came to America to exercise my first amendment freedom of speech – I don’t want to die. I want to fight against tyranny and I deserve to be safe. I thank law enforcement for protecting me, but I urge the US government to protect America’s national security.”

Attorneys for the other two defendants, identified as Jonathan Loadholt and Carlisle Rivera, did not immediately return messages seeking comment.

In Tehran, Esmail Baghaei, a spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry, dismissed the report and called it a plot by circles linked to Israel to complicate the Iran-US relationship, the official IRNA news agency reported.

Similar accusations in the past have been rejected by Iran as they have been proven “erroneous”, he said.

“Repeating the accusation in the current time frame is a disgusting plot by Zionist and anti-Iranian circles, which aimed to complicate the US-Iran issues,” Baghaei said.

Shakeri, an Afghan national who immigrated to the US as a child but was later deported after spending 14 years in prison for robbery, also told investigators that he was instructed by his contact with the Revolutionary Guard to set up the killing of two American Jews living in New York. York and Israeli tourists in Sri Lanka. Officials say he overlapped with Rivera while in prison, as well as an unidentified co-conspirator.

The criminal complaint says Shakeri revealed some of the details of the alleged plots in a series of taped phone interviews with FBI agents while in Iran. The stated reason for his cooperation, he told investigators, was to try to get a reduced prison sentence for an associate behind bars in the US.

According to the complaint, although officials determined that some of the information he provided was false, his statements about a plot to kill Trump and Iran’s willingness to pay large sums of money were found to be accurate.

The plot, announced by the Justice Department just days after Trump’s defeat of Democrat Kamala Harris, is part of what federal officials have described as Iran’s continued efforts to target US government officials, including Trump, on US soil. Last summer, for example, The Department of Justice has charged a Pakistani man with ties to Iran in a murder-for-hire plot targeting US officials.

“There are few actors in the world that pose as serious a threat to the national security of the United States as Iran,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement Friday. FBI Director Christopher Wray said the case shows Iran’s “continuing deranged attempts to target American citizens,” including Trump, “other government leaders and dissidents critical of the regime in Tehran.”

Also, Iranian agents conducted a hack-and-leak operation of emails belonging to Trump campaign associates in what officials assessed was an effort to interfere in the presidential election and harm the Trump campaign.

Intelligence officials said Iran opposed Trump’s re-election, seeing him as more likely to increase tension between Washington and Tehran. the Trump administration concluded a nuclear deal with Iranreimposed sanctions and ordered the killing of Iranian general Qassem Soleimanian act that prompted Iran’s leaders to do so vow revenge.

Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said the president-elect was aware of the assassination plot and nothing would deter him “from returning to the White House and restoring peace to the entire world.”

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Neumeister reported from New York. Associated Press writers Zeke Miller and Edith M. Lederer contributed to this report.