Activist and journalist Masih Alinejad was the secondary target in Iran’s plot to assassinate Donald Trump, court documents reveal.
The Justice Department on Friday unsealed criminal charges against three people involved in the thwarted plot to kill Trump before the election.
Farjad Shakeri, 51, who is still at-large in Iran, was to be the lead man for both assassinations until the operation was paused
Carlisle Rivera, 49, and Jonathon Loadholt, 36, were arrested by the FBI in New York City and faced court on Thursday, accused of conspiracy.
Activist and journalist Masih Alinejad was the secondary target in Iran’s plot to assassinate Donald Trump, court documents reveal
Alinejad is a human rights activist living in Brooklyn who has long criticized Iran’s extreme repression of women.
She was the target of at least two other recent assassination plots, and is the target of a fatwa issued by Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Iranian intelligence planned to kidnap her in 2021 and take her back to Iran for a grim fate, and in July 2022 a man was arrested after staking out her home for two weeks with a loaded AK-47.
FBI charging documents described her an an Iranian American journalist, author, and political activist, and an outspoken critic of the Iranian regime’s human rights abuses and corruption.
Alinejad ‘has long been a high-priority target of the Iranian regime’, it stated.
The criminal complaint alleged Shakeri was tasked with organizing the hits by Iranian intelligence, and offered Rivera and Loadholt $100,000 to get them done.
More to come.
