The justice department on Friday disclosed an Iranian murder-for-hire plot to kill Donald Trump, charging a man who said he had been tasked by a government official before this week’s election with assassinating the Republican President-elect.

Investigators learned of the plot to kill Trump while interviewing Farhad Shakeri, an Afghan national identified by officials as an Iranian government asset who was deported from the US after being imprisoned on robbery charges.

He told investigators that a contact in Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard instructed him this past September to put together a plan within seven days to surveil and ultimately kill Trump, according to a criminal complaint unsealed in federal court in Manhattan. Two other men who the authorities say were recruited to participate in other assassinations, including a prominent Iranian American journalist, were also arrested on Friday. Shakeri remains in Iran.

“There are few actors in the world that pose as grave a threat to the national security of the US as does Iran,” attorney-general Merrick B. Garland said in a statement.

The plot, with the charges unsealed just days after Trump’s defeat of Democrat Kamala Harris, reflects what federal officials have described as ongoing efforts by Iran to target US government officials, including Trump, on US soil. Last summer, the justice department charged a Pakistani man with ties to Iran in a murder-for-hire plot.

Prisoner claim

An Iranian official claimed on Tuesday that Iranian-German prisoner Jamshid Sharmahd died before Tehran could execute him — directly contradicting the country’s earlier announcement he had been put to death.

The comment by Asghar Jahangir comes after Germany shut down all three Iranian consulates in the country over Sharmahd’s death, leaving only the embassy in Berlin open. Germany later disputed Jahangir’s remark.

AP