Washington: An Iranian operative has been charged in a plot to murder former US national security adviser John Bolton in presumed retaliation for a US airstrike that killed the country’s most powerful general, offering $US300,000 ($423,000) to “eliminate” the Trump administration official, the Justice Department said.
Shahram Poursafi, identified by US officials as a member of Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, is currently wanted by the FBI on charges related to the murder-for-hire plot.
Prosecutors say the scheme unfolded more than a year after Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Revolutionary Guard’s elite Quds Force and an architect of Tehran’s proxy wars in the Middle East, was killed in a targeted airstrike as he travelled from Baghdad’s international airport in January 2020. After the strike, Bolton, who by then had left his White House post, tweeted, “Hope this is the first step to regime change in Tehran”.
The FBI believes that Poursafi was acting on behalf of the Revolutionary Guard when he sought to have Bolton killed, according to an affidavit unsealed on Wednesday (Thursday AEST). Law enforcement officials located photographs of him in fatigues and with posters of Iran and Soleimani in the background to back up their allegation that he is a uniformed Revolutionary Guard member.
The Justice Department traces the plot to the fall of 2021, when Poursafi, an Iranian citizen who officials say has never visited the United States, asked an unidentified person he met through social media and who was living in the US to take photographs of Bolton for a book he said he was writing.
Read the article by Eric Tucker in the Sydney Morning Herald.