Who is Farhad Shakeri, the Afghan national accused of masterminding Iran's plot to kill Donald Trump?
Prosecutors in the US have filed murder-for-hire charges against the accused in an alleged Iranian plot to kill President-elect Donald Trump. According to the Justice Department, three people have been charged in a plot to murder Trump, a prominent Iranian American, and other government leaders and dissidents who criticise the regime in Tehran.??
Who is Farhad Shakeri
Two of those charged by the DoJ are Americans, while the mastermind is an Afghan-born individual who lived in the US and is currently believed to be in Iran.??
Farhad Shakeri, who was born in Afghanistan, came to the US at a young age but was deported in 2008 after spending 14 years in prison for robbery. According to the DoJ, the 51-year-old was jailed in 1994 and was housed in a number of state prisons, including Woodbourne Correctional Center.??
How he became an Iranian asset
Shakeri is said to have befriended Jonathan Loadholt and Carlisle Rivera, the two other accused in the murder-for-hire case, during his time in prison.??
According to the authorities, Shakeri maintains a network of criminal associates enlisted by Tehran for surveillance and murder-for-hire plots.??
Plot to kill Donald Trump
The criminal complaint says Shakeri disclosed some of the details of the alleged plots in a series of recorded telephone interviews with FBI agents while in Iran.??
According to the complaint, while officials determined that some of the information he provided was false, Shakeri's statements regarding a plot to kill Trump and Iran's willingness to pay large sums of money were determined to be accurate.??
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'We have already spent a lot of money'
Shakeri told the FBI that a contact in Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard instructed him this past September to set aside other work he was doing and assemble a plan within seven days to surveil and ultimately kill Trump, according to a criminal complaint unsealed in federal court in Manhattan.??
¡°We have already spent a lot of money¡± and ¡°money's not an issue,¡± Shakeri told investigators. The official allegedly told him that if he could not put together a plan within the seven-day timeframe, then the plot would be paused until after the election, assuming Trump would lose and that it would be easier to kill him then, the complaint said.
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