US Charges Iranian With Plot To Kill Ex-White House Official John Bolton

Washington, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 11th Aug, 2022 ) :The US Justice Department said Wednesday it had uncovered an Iranian plot to kill former White House national security adviser John Bolton, and announced charges against a member of Iran's Revolutionary Guards.

The Justice Department said 45-year-old Shahram Poursafi had offered to pay an individual in the United States $300,000 to kill Bolton, the former ambassador to the United Nations.

The plan was likely set in retaliation for the US killing of top Guard commander Qasem Soleimani in Iraq in January 2020, the department said. According to the charges, Poursafi is a member of the Guard's elite Quds Force.

The allegation came 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 have 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 onto another contact, whom Poursafi then asked to kill Bolton for $300,000.

He also dangled the possibility of a second target which would earn the ostensible assassin $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 actually 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.