Asif Merchant is accused of proactively searching for a hitman to eliminate unspecified officials in anger that the United States has assassinated an Iranian military chief.
The United States has laid a terrorism conspiracy charge against a Pakistani man, whom it claimed had linkages with Iran, to the terror activity of planning to carry out political killings.
Asif Merchant traveled to New York in June looking for this hitman in an effort to assassinate either a politician or anyone affiliated with the U.S. government in a bid to avenge the killing of a top Iranian military general in the year 2020, the U.S. Justice Department stated in a Wednesday’s statement.
Merchant, who prosecutors claimed was in Iran before he proceeded to the US from Pakistan, was arraigned before a federal court in Brooklyn, New York, for murder for hire.
He was arrested in July while planning to leave the country after discussing with the would-be gunman, where he said that the further instructions of the operation, including the names of the targets, were to be provided next month or the month after when he would be back in Pakistan.
Sheri LaPine, a lawyer for Merchant, refused to speak from Avraham Moskowitz on Tuesday to the Associated Press news agency regarding the case.
The name of the intended target has not been released, but the attorney general stated that no information has come forward to tie Merchant with the attempt on the life of the former President Donald Trump on the 13th of July this year in Butler, Pennsylvania.
‘Unrelenting efforts to retaliate’
As per the charges after the sequence allegedly linking Merchant with the search for a hitman, there has been an urge for Iran to have revenge against the US regarding the killing of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’s (IRGC) top commander Qassem Soleimani in the year 2020.
For years, the Justice Department has been acting to reverse Iran’s blatant and unabating attempts to strike back at American officials for the assassination of Iranian General Soleimani, according to Attorney General Merrick Garland.
