New York: A Pakistani citizen has been charged in an elaborate plot to assassinate Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.US Attorney General Merrick Garland, who announced the charges against Asif Merchant on Tuesday, indicated that the target was Trump, but did not name him.
Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI) Chief Christopher Wray said, “This dangerous murder-for-hire plot exposed in today’s charges allegedly was orchestrated by a Pakistani national with close ties to Iran and is straight out of the Iranian playbook.”
The alleged plotter, who is also known as Asif Raza Merchant, told officials that he has two wives, one each in Pakistan and in Iran, as well as children in both countries. “For years, the Justice Department has been working aggressively to counter Iran’s brazen and unrelenting efforts to retaliate against American public officials for the killing of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani,” IANS quoted him as saying.
Trump was the US President when he ordered the killing of Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad in 2020, which points the assassination plot towards him.
According to court documents, others may also have been intended victims because of the mention of targets in the plural.
In the complaint filed in the Federal court in Brooklyn, the plot reads like a spy thriller with an elaborate scheme to burglarise the home of a target, creating diversions with protests and rallies, and killing the politician. It also included a show of bonding between Merchant, 46, and the undercover officers he thought were professional killers.
The court papers said the plot involved multiple elements: stealing documents or USB drives from a target’s home; planning protests, and killing a politician or government official. Merchant made up code names for each element in the plot: “tee-shirt” for protests, “flannel shirt” for stealing documents, “fleece jacket” for the assassination, and “yarn-dye” for their meetings.
To entice the person he contacted first and who informed officials, Merchant told him that he has an uncle in the “yarn-dyed” business in Pakistan and he could go into business with them. He asked the government source he thought was an assassin for hire to explain how the target would die in different scenarios.
The revelation about this plot comes less than a month after the July 13 failed assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.
However, there does not seem to be a connection between the plot by Merchant and that attempt, which officials have said was carried out by a lone wolf, a person unconnected to any group or organisation.
The plot failed because Merchant tried to recruit FBI agents for the assassination attempt.
