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Even before a U.S. airstrike “obliterated” a trio of Iranian nuclear facilities over the weekend, the country’s radical Islamist government was already leveling death threats and allegedly plotting assassinations on American soil.
Federal authorities have called Iran the world’s largest state sponsor of terror, and the FBI says the Iranian government has both imprisoned Americans within its territory on unsubstantiated charges and harassed and even killed dissidents in exile.
“Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated,” President Donald Trump said during a nationally broadcast statement from the White House Saturday after American stealth bombers blasted three facilities. “And Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace. If they do not, future attacks would be far greater and a lot easier.”
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The bombings came amid an increasingly deadly conflict involving Iran and Israel, which is at war with the Iran-backed terror group Hamas.
Last year, the Justice Department said it thwarted a plot to kill Trump after Election Day. Separately, the DOJ announced the arrest and conviction of two other Iranian assets accused of plotting to kill an American journalist, Masih Alinejad, who was critical of the theocracy.
“I am shocked,” she posted on X at the time. “I just learned from the @FBI that two men were arrested yesterday in a new plot to kill me at Fairfield University, where I was scheduled to give a talk. I also learned that the person assigned to assassinate @realDonaldTrump was also assigned to kill me on U.S. soil. The alleged killers also went in front of my house in Brooklyn.”
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Another suspected Iranian agent is Asif Merchant. The Pakistani man is accused of posing as an international clothing salesman and trying to hire hit men in Brooklyn nightclubs in an alleged assassination plot targeting key U.S. figures, possibly even Trump.
“For 40 years, Iran has been saying, ‘Death to America, death to Israel.’ They have been killing our people, blowing off their arms, blowing off their legs with roadside bombs,” Trump said Saturday. “That was their specialty. We lost over a thousand people, and hundreds of thousands throughout the Middle East and around the world have died as a direct result of their hate in particular.”
Other threats may not have directly come from Iran but appear to have been, at least in part, inspired by the regime there.
In March 2022, an Iranian-born Texas 23-year-old named Nika Nikoubin lured a man into a Las Vegas hotel for sex and stabbed him in the neck. She initially told police the stabbing came as revenge for the U.S. drone strike that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani – a designated terrorist leader who the Defense Department blames for the deaths of hundreds of American troops and thousands of severe injuries overseas.
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Days before Trump ordered the drone strike that killed him, Soleimani had orchestrated a deadly attack on a U.S. base in Iraq. Authorities have said Iran has been seeking retaliation for his death for years. Also in 2022, federal prosecutors charged another Iranian agent with trying to have former White House national security advisor John Bolton killed for $300,000.
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Shahram Poursafi, also known as Mehdi Rezayi, allegedly tried to hire assassins in Washington, D.C., and Maryland, according to the Justice Department. He had a second, unnamed target he was willing to pay up to $1 million to have killed, authorities said.
“Iran has a history of plotting to assassinate individuals in the U.S. it deems a threat, but the U.S. government has a longer history of holding accountable those who threaten the safety of our citizens,” Larissa Knapp, executive assistant director of the FBI’s National Security Branch, said at the time. “Let there be no doubt: The FBI, the U.S. government, and our partners remain vigilant in the fight against such threats here in the U.S. and overseas.”
Even as far back as 2013, an Iranian-born U.S. citizen named Manssor Arbabsiar was sentenced to 25 years in prison for his role in a conspiracy to kill the Saudi ambassador to the U.S.
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With $100,000 from Iran’s Quds Force, the Iranian military division run by Soleimani, Arbabsiar tried to hire an assassin from a Mexican drug cartel who was actually a DEA informant.
Iranian Big. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, head of the country’s “Aerospace Force,” had called for the deaths of Trump, former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other U.S. officials in the aftermath of Soleimani’s death. He was one of several high-ranking Iranian leaders killed in Israeli airstrikes last week.
Federal prosecutors have also blamed Iranian agents for cybercrimes, including attacks on presidential campaigns from both parties.
On Monday, Iran fired missiles toward the U.S.-run Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar – the Pentagon’s largest military installation in the Middle East.
None of them reached the base, Fox News reported.
Fox News’ Liz Friden and Emma Colton contributed to this report.
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