WASHINGTON – The US Justice Department has announced charges against a member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards for allegedly plotting to kill former White House national security advisor John Bolton – an accusation Tehran dismissed as “fiction” today.
The Justice Department said yesterday that 45-year-old Shahram Poursafi had offered to pay an individual in the United States US$300,000 (RM1.33 million) to kill Bolton, a former ambassador to the United Nations.
The plan was likely set in retaliation for the US killing of top Guards commander Qasem Soleimani in Iraq in January 2020, the department said. According to the charges, Poursafi is a member of the Guards’ elite Quds Force.
The justice department said he remains at large, presumably in Iran.
But Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani accused the department of making “allegations without providing valid evidence, creating a new work of fiction”.
“The Islamic republic warns against any action that targets Iranian citizens by resorting to ridiculous accusations,” he added.
The allegation comes as Iran weighs a proposed deal to revive the 2015 agreement that aims to prevent Tehran from developing nuclear weapons.
Former US president Donald Trump withdrew from the agreement in 2018. Ongoing talks in Vienna to rekindle it has been held up as the US and Tehran argue over Washington’s designation of the Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist group.
US court filings say that in October Poursafi, working from inside Iran, contacted an unidentified person in the United States saying he wanted to commission photographs of Bolton.
That person passed the Iranian on to another contact, whom Poursafi then asked to kill Bolton for US$300,000.
He also dangled the possibility of a second target which would earn the ostensible assassin US$1 million.
The court papers did not identify that target but, according to US media outlet Axios, it was former secretary of state and CIA director Mike Pompeo.
However, the person Poursafi was dealing with was an informant for the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to the court filings.
An FBI affidavit describes how the informant stalled for months as investigators appeared to seek out more information about Poursafi, his organization and superiors, and his apparent separate network inside the United States.
Poursafi was charged with the use of interstate commerce facilities in the commission of murder-for-hire, which brings up to 10 years in prison; and with providing and attempting to provide material support to a transnational murder plot, which carries a 15-year sentence.
“Should Iran attack any of our citizens, to include those who continue to serve the United States or those who formerly served, Iran will face severe consequences,” current White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said after the charges were announced.
In encrypted messages with the informant, Poursafi said the plot related to Tehran’s desire for revenge for the US killing of Soleimani, according to the affidavit.
Soleimani was head of the Quds Force and personally maintained its network of allies and proxies across the Gulf region.
He was targeted by a US drone strike just after he landed at Baghdad’s airport on January 7, 2020.
Since then Tehran has vowed to exact revenge, and the United States has ramped up security for prominent current and former officials, including Pompeo, who was leading the State Department when Soleimani was killed.
Kanani on Thursday said the justice department’s “baseless claims” were a smokescreen to “avoid being held to account for the numerous crimes in which the US government has been directly implicated, like the cowardly assassination” of Soleimani.
Bolton was strongly opposed to the 2015 deal putting limits on Iran’s nuclear program.
Tehran is currently reviewing a final draft agreement to restore the deal, officially called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
For months Tehran has held up the new agreement, demanding that the United States remove its designation of the Revolutionary Guards as a sponsor of terrorism.
But the US has rejected that demand. – AFP, August 11, 2022
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