The U.S. Department of Justice charged three men on Friday who it said were involved in an Iranian plot to assassinate President-elect Donald Trump and to murder Jews, Israelis and an Iranian-American rights advocate.
Prosecutors charged Farhad Shakeri, 51, of Iran; Carlisle Rivera, 49, of Brooklyn, N.Y.; and Jonathan Loadholt, 36, of Staten Island, N.Y., with two murder-for-hire counts and one money laundering count each, carrying a maximum of 40 years in prison total per person.
Shakeri is further accused of terrorism and sanctions violations charges with an additional 60 years of potential prison time.
“The charges announced today expose Iran’s continued brazen attempts to target U.S. citizens, including President-elect Donald Trump, other government leaders and dissidents who criticize the regime in Tehran,” stated Christopher Wray, the FBI director.
“The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—a designated foreign terrorist organization—has been conspiring with criminals and hitmen to target and gun down Americans on U.S. soil and that simply won’t be tolerated,” Wray added.
Police arrested Loadholt and Rivera on Thursday, and the two appeared in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York the same day. Shakeri is at large and believed to be in Iran, according to the Justice Department.
According to the criminal complaint, Shakeri, on behalf of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, attempted to orchestrate targeted assassinations of Americans and the mass killing of Israelis.
Masih Alinejad, an Iranian-American advocate for Iranian rights whom the regime previously attempted to kill in a thwarted 2022 attack in Brooklyn, identified herself as one of the would-be targets of the murder-for-hire conspiracy on Friday.
“I just learned from the FBI that two men were arrested yesterday in a new plot to kill me at Fairfield University, where I was scheduled to give a talk,” she wrote. “I came to America to practice my First Amendment right to freedom of speech—I don’t want to die.”
Shakeri told FBI agents in a series of telephone conversations between September and November that the IRGC instructed him in mid-September to try to kill Trump and that it was willing to spend a “huge” amount of money to do so.
The terrorist organization also instructed him to kill two “Jewish businesspeople residing in New York City,” identified in the complaint as “Victim-2” and “Victim-3”.
“Shakeri explained that the IRGC provided him with pictures of Victim-2 and Victim-3, which, according to Shakeri, appeared to come from social media and which indicated Victim-2 and Victim-3’s support for Israel,” the complaint says.
The IRGC offered $500,000 each for the killing of the two Jews.
The terror group also instructed him to plan a mass shooting of Israeli tourists at Arugam Bay in Sri Lanka that was thwarted by U.S. and Sri Lankan authorities, who arrested three men in October after Israel and the United States issued warning of an impending attack.
