Iran

Iranian operatives sought to assassinate now President-elect Donald Trump just weeks before Tuesday's U.S. presidential election and were willing to forego other plots against regime critics and high-profile targets to see it through, court documents say.

The revelations, in documents unsealed Friday against the suspects in an unrelated murder-for-hire plot, stem from a series of conversations between the alleged ringleader, 51-year-old Farhad Shakeri, and the FBI.

The documents indicate that Shakeri, who said he was in Tehran at the time of the conversations, agreed to speak with the FBI to gain a reduced prison sentence for an unnamed prisoner in the U.S.

Shakeri told the agents that an official with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps approached him in mid- to late September, asking him to set aside a plot to kill an Iranian dissident and journalist in New York, to instead go after Trump.

Shakeri said he was asked to provide a plan within seven days and that when he said targeting Trump would be costly, the IRGC official told him, "We have already spent a lot of money … money's not an issue."

He also told the FBI that if a plan could not be formulated within the seven-day timeframe, the IRGC official planned to wait until after the U.S. election, reasoning Trump would lose and that it would be easier to kill him.

The court documents do not say whether Shakeri’s conversations with the FBI were authorized by the IRGC or other authorities in Iran. The Iranian mission at the United Nations did not respond to a request for comment.

The plot against Trump is just the latest in what U.S. officials have described as brazen attempts by Tehran to kill the former and future U.S. president in retaliation for a 2020 drone strike in Baghdad that killed Qassem Soleimani, the leader of the IRGC's Quds Force.

In August, U.S. officials charged a Pakistani man, Asif Merchant, who had traveled to the United States months earlier on behalf of Iran looking for hitmen to kill Trump and others.

SEE ALSO:

Iranian plot to kill US officials, politicians tied to Pakistani man

"There are few actors in the world that pose as grave a threat to the national security of the United States as does Iran," said U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland in a statement Friday.

"We will not stand for the Iranian regime's attempts to endanger the American people and America's national security," he added.

Trump’s communications director said that the president-elect was aware of the plot by "the Iranian terrorist regime."

"Nothing will deter President Trump from returning to the White House and restoring peace around the world," Steven Cheung said in an email to VOA.

U.S. officials have been especially concerned about Iran's repeated use of criminal gangs and others to carry out its dirty work ((plotting)) on American soil.

Court documents allege Shakeri, an Afghan national who immigrated to the U.S. as a child, fits the description.

The documents say Shakeri was deported from the U.S. in 2008, after spending 14 years in prison for robbery. But they add that during his time behind bars, Shakeri cultivated a network of criminal associates that he then would use in efforts to carry out Iran's orders.

According to prosecutors, one of those associates was working with Shakeri up until the U.S. election to kill VOA Persian Service journalist Masih Alinejad, described in the court documents as "an Iranian American journalist, author, and political activist, and an outspoken critic of the Iranian regime's human rights abuses and corruption."

The associate, 49-year-old Carlisle Rivera, then turned to one of his acquaintances, 36-year-old Jonathan Loadholt, to carry out the attack for a sum of $100,000.

Rivera and Loadholt were arrested Thursday.

Shakeri, Rivera and Loadholt are charged with murder-for-hire, conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire and money laundering conspiracy. The charges carry maximum prison sentences of 10 to 20 years.

Shakeri is also charged with providing and conspiring to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization.

Alinejad on Friday expressed astonishment that she was wrapped up in the plot to kill the president-elect.

"I am shocked," she wrote on the X social media platform. "[T]he person assigned to assassinate @realDonaldTrump was also assigned to kill me on U.S. soil."

"I came to America to practice my First Amendment right to freedom of speech — I don't want to die," she said. "Thank you to law enforcement for protecting me."

Last month, U.S. prosecutors charged a senior IRGC official in connection with a failed assassination attempt against Alinejad in 2022.

SEE ALSO:

US charges Iranian Revolutionary Guard official in plot to kill VOA host

New details have emerged about Iran’s rare execution this week of a member of its tiny Jewish minority.

VOA has learned that Arvin Ghahremani, the first Jewish person executed by the Islamic Republic in 30 years, was put to death in the western city of Kermanshah on Monday without prior notice to his family. Iranian authorities had convicted Ghahremani, who was in his early 20s, of murdering a Muslim man in a 2022 street altercation over money, following a legal process that rights activists denounced as unfair and tainted by antisemitism.

A U.S.-based source with contacts in Iran sent VOA the text of a letter that Ghahremani’s Iranian lawyer, Peyman Saketkhou, wrote on Tuesday and stated that Ghahremani had been executed without notice to family members or defense lawyers.

Saketkhou said he had done everything he could to try to vacate the death sentence, but the family of the man who Ghahremani killed had exercised its legal right to reject financial compensation from the Ghahremani family in lieu of execution.

The source also sent VOA a funeral notice printed by Ghahremani’s immediate family, informing mourners that his funeral would be held on Wednesday at Kermanshah’s Etehad Synagogue, where his uncle is a community leader. Other relatives of Ghahremani live in Los Angeles, the source added. The funeral notice was first published on X by Iranian American journalist Karmel Melamed on Tuesday.

The source requested anonymity to safeguard communications with Iran-based lawyers, whose work on cases dealing with sensitive issues has exposed them to harassment and arrest by Iranian authorities.

“The execution of Ghahremani without notice to the family shows the cruelty of the regime,” George Haroonian, an Iranian American rights activist, said in a statement to VOA.

Kermanshah is home to one of Iran’s smallest Jewish communities. The largest is in the capital, Tehran. The State Department’s latest annual report on international religious freedom, published in June, cites the Tehran Jewish Committee as saying Iran has about 9,000 Jews out of an estimated total population of 89 million people.

Iran’s last execution of a Jewish community member was in February 1994. Feysollah Mechubad, a 77-year-old man, was executed at the time for “associating with Zionism,” a reference to the Islamic Republic’s archenemy, Israel. Prior to that, Iran executed two other Jews — Habib Elghanian and Avraham Boruchim, in 1979 and 1980, respectively, at the start of its Islamic Revolution.

The Biden administration issued its first reaction to Ghahremani’s execution on Wednesday.

“We are dismayed by reports that the regime in Iran executed Arvin Ghahramani. The circumstances of the case and prosecution raise troubling questions about due process,” U.S. special envoy Deborah Lipstadt said in a post on the X platform.

Iran's U.N. mission in New York declined to comment when asked by VOA for a response to Lipstadt's statement.

In May, when Iranian authorities transferred Ghahremani to death row, Lipstadt noted in another X post that the Islamic Republic “often subject(s) Jewish citizens to different standards when it comes to determining judgements in cases of this nature.”

Ghahremani had been sentenced to death under Iran’s Islamic legal principle of qisas, or an “eye for an eye.” It gives a victimized party the right to inflict harm on the perpetrator that is similar to what the victim suffered, or to accept blood money from the offending party or to forgive that offender.

In a report published Monday, Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights cited an informed source as saying Ghahremani’s religion initially was cited as Shiite Muslim in the case, and the family of the Muslim man he killed had agreed to accept blood money from Ghahremani’s family. But the group said the slain man’s family changed its mind and insisted on execution after discovering that Ghahremani was Jewish.

“Institutionalized antisemitism in the Islamic Republic undoubtedly played a crucial role in the implementation of [Ghahremani’s] sentence,” Iran Human Rights said. The group said Ghahremani’s court-appointed lawyer also “did not effectively defend [him] for unknown reasons and [Ghahremani’s] right to self-defense was not properly presented in the case.”

Another Iran-based rights group, Human Rights Activists in Iran, reacted to Ghahremani’s execution by noting that under Iranian law, when a Muslim kills a non-Muslim, qisas does not give the non-Muslim’s family the right to seek the offender’s execution. It said that in such cases, only blood money or lesser punishments typically are imposed.

Israel responded quickly to Ghahremani’s execution with a strongly worded statement. In a Monday post on X, the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s Persian-language X account published a photo of Ghahremani with the message: “The regime of the Islamic Republic once again showed the world that it is nothing but a criminal and bloodthirsty sect.”

Inside Iran, leaders of the Jewish community issued more restrained messages on their social media channels. Iran’s designated Jewish lawmaker, Homayoon Sameh Yeh Najafabadi, used his Telegram channel to post a screenshot of a condolence letter to his community, while prominent Iranian rabbi Yehuda Gerami posted an Instagram photo of Ghahremani in a prison uniform and added a traditionally impassive Hebrew blessing: “Blessed is the true judge.”

Thamar Gindin, an Iran expert at the Ezri Center at Israel's Haifa University, told VOA in an interview that Gerami does not want trouble with Iranian authorities over his social media postings.

“One wrong word from him can mean trouble for the whole Iranian Jewish community. He has responsibility for the welfare of many people,” she said.

Beni Sabti, a Persian Israeli researcher at Tel Aviv University's Institute for National Security Studies, said in a separate interview that another factor in the restrained response of Iranian Jewish community leaders is the nature of the crime for which Ghahremani was executed.

“You have to consider this case in proportion. It was about Ghahremani killing someone, not about him being Jewish,” he said.

Sabti said his sources in Iran’s Jewish community privately expressed to him their shock and sadness at Ghahremani’s execution but felt they could do little about it.

Gindin noted that Ghahremani was one of many people executed by Iran recently. The Hengaw Organization for Human Rights reported last week that Iran executed at least 161 prisoners in October, more than doubling the previous month’s total of 78 executions.

“The Islamic Republic is at a very weak point right now, particularly in its conflict with Israel,” Gindin said. “So, the regime has to execute more Iranians to send its people a message that such weakness will not extend toward the regime’s domestic opponents as well,” she said.