Iran rejects role in alleged plot to assassinate Donald Trump

Iran has rejected a report it was behind an alleged plot to assassinate Donald Trump after the US Justice Department charged a man in connection with the plan.

The man said he had been tasked by a government official before the presidential election with assassinating the Republican president-elect.

In Tehran, Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei called it a plot by Israel-linked circles to make Iran-US relations more complicated, the official IRNA news agency reported.

Similar accusations in the past were rejected by Iran as their “erroneousness” was proved, he said.

“Repeat of the accusation in the current time span is a disgusting plot by the Zionist and anti-Iran circles that has aimed at making US-Iran problems more complicated,” Mr Baghaei said.

The man said he had been tasked by a government official before the presidential election with assassinating the Republican president-elect.

Investigators learned of the plot to kill Mr Trump from Farhad Shakeri, an accused Iranian government asset who spent time in American prisons for robbery. Authorities say he maintains a web of criminal associates who participate in Tehran’s assassination plots.

Shakeri told investigators that in September, a contact in Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard instructed him to put together a plan within seven days to watch and ultimately kill Mr Trump, according to a criminal complaint unsealed in federal court in Manhattan.

Shakeri claimed the Iranian official said that “we have already spent a lot of money” and that “money’s not an issue”.

He told investigators the official told him that if he could not put together a plan within the seven-day timeframe, then the plot would be paused until after the election because the official assumed that Mr Trump would lose and that it would be easier to kill him then, the complaint said.

Shakeri is at large and remains in Iran.

Two other men who were allegedly recruited to participate in other assassinations, including of a prominent Iranian American journalist, were arrested on Friday.

Shakeri, an Afghan national who immigrated to the US as a child but was later deported after spending 14 years in prison for robbery, also told investigators that he was tasked by his Revolutionary Guard contact with plotting the killings of two Jewish-Americans living in New York and Israeli tourists in Sri Lanka.

The criminal complaint says Shakeri disclosed some of the details of the alleged plots in a series of recorded telephone interviews with FBI agents while in Iran.

The stated reason for his cooperation, he told investigators, was to try to get a reduced prison sentence for an associate behind bars in the US.