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The suspect claimed that in addition to Trump, his Iranian handler also named Biden and Haley as possible targets. ..."I was not wanting to do this so willingly," the New York Times quoted Merchant as telling a court during his trial for terrorism and murder-for-hire charges, adding that he participated to protect his family in Tehran.

A Pakistani man has been convicted of planning to kill Donald Trump and other prominent US politicians. The trial showcased allegations of Iran-backed plotting on American soil. Asif Merchant, 47, was accused of trying to recruit ‌people in the US in a plan targeting Mr Trump and others after Washington's killing of Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani in 2020, during his first term. Then president Joe Biden and Nikki Haley, who ran ​against Mr Trump that year for the Republican presidential nomination, were also targeted in the ​2024 plot. ...

Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan on Sunday castigated President Donald Trump for “murdering” his “brother from Iran” Quds Force commander Gen. Qassem Soleimani in Iraq last month. Farrakhan added that he had not supported Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid because she had killed his “brother” Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. During a three-and-a-half-hour keynote address at the Savior’s Day conference in Detroit, Michigan, Farrakhan said that while Trump had justified the killing of Soleimani by saying he was a “bad man” who had killed many Americans, Soleimani was “no terrorist” and had only been “helping the people of Iraq rid themselves...

The banking giant HSBC "knowingly" provided support to four of Mexico's most notorious drug cartels by laundering their money and providing material support to terrorists, according to a new lawsuit filed by four families. The papers filed in U.S. District Court in Brownsville, Texas, on Tuesday say that laundering drug money made it possible for the cartels to operate. "HSBC's substantial and systemic money laundering support materially aided the activities of the Mexican cartels, including the Sinaoloa, Juárez, and Los Zetas cartels," court documents read.

For a few years, a wide-spread effort by the Mexican military to arrest or kill cartel leaders, most notably Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, seemed to be making progress. But as Cartels began to fight for the territory of military-weakened rivals, the homicide rate once again exploded. Now, a disturbing video shows the extreme length that participants in the emerging all-out gang war will go to retain or take power. The graphic video shows two Los Zetas gunmen insulting rival gangs behind a shirtless, kneeling man. The gunmen claim that their victim is part of a rival gang who was sent...

MONTERREY, Mexico (Reuters) – Mexican gunmen have kidnapped a U.S. security consultant who negotiated the release of dozens of kidnap victims in Latin America. Gunmen abducted Felix Batista outside a restaurant last Wednesday in the relatively safe northern industrial city of Saltillo in Coahuila state, Mexican authorities and his employer, security consultancy ASI Global, said on Monday. Batista, a Miami-based Cuban American credited with negotiating the release of victims abducted by Colombian rebels, was snatched after he stepped outside the restaurant, answering a call on his cellular phone, Mexican media said. The U.S. embassy in Mexico City said it was...

<p>Responding to last week's terrorist attacks in Riyadh, President Bush declared that "the United States will find the killers, and they will learn the meaning of American justice." This is a president who is serious about fighting and winning the war on terrorism. The liberation of Iraq and the continued effort to bring al Qaeda to justice are all the proof anyone should need.</p>

The disgraced relative of an Iranian warlord being deported from California has reached out to her former LA love interest from an ICE detention center to beg for help. Married Hamideh Soleimani Afshar, 47, niece of terror mastermind Gen. Qasem Soleimani – former commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard who was taken out in a deadly 2020 U.S. air strike – frantically called Maziar Aflaki, 68, on Monday from the facility in Pearsall, Texas. But on hearing her voice, retiree Aflaki declined to accept the call, claiming years of harassment and abuse at the hands of Afshar. He told the...

While American forces conducted an astonishing rescue of a downed Weapons Systems Officer, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) escalated the stakes against Iran's leadership yet again, going after the men in charge of Tehran's oppression and terror organizations. One of this weekend's big names is Maj. Gen. Majid Khademi, now confirmed dead, who until the moment of his vaporization served as the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) intelligence organization. Khademi's death was confirmed Monday by an IRGC statement carried by the Iranian state Fars news service. The same IRGC statement said that funeral and burial arrangements would...

A man accused of hiring a hitman to take out US politicians, including President Donald Trump, says he was pressured by Iran's elite ​Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) to devise the plot. A man accused of plotting to kill US President Donald Trump and other top politicians told the court on Wednesday he was pressured by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to organise their assassinations. Pakistan national Asif Raza Merchant, 47, was charged in September 2024 with seeking to hire a hitman to assassinate unidentified US politicians. He pleaded not guilty to the charges. The IRGC — Iran's elite...

Both CNN and the Washington Post reported yesterday that the Iranian regime is plotting to kill President Trump. Jewish World Review has posted the Washington Post story in accessible form here. Intelligence concerning the plot derives from a human source and is apparently unrelated to the attempted assassination of Trump over the weekend.NRO’s Jimmy Quinn quotes Rich Goldberg’s tweet on the rationale for such an operation: “Donald Trump is an existential threat to the Islamic Republic of Iran. The regime knows maximum pressure will return.”The incompetence of the Secret Service presents something of a national security crisis. The Post drily...

The stunned Los Angeles renter of the property owned by the niece of Iranian terror mastermind Gen. Qasem Soleimani said he now realizes the mom and her daughter had been on ICE’s radar for some time before agents swooped on the quiet Tujunga home and hauled the pair away. Hamideh Soleimani Afshar, 47, and her daughter, Sarinasadat Hosseiny, 25, were arrested by ICE Friday and had their green cards revoked for ties to the Iranian regime. Afshar had celebrated attacks on US soldiers and military facilities, praised Iran’s Supreme Leader, called America the “Great Satan,” and voiced support for the...

The niece and grandniece of slain Iranian mastermind Gen. Qasem Soleimani were arrested by US officials, the State Department announced Saturday. Hamideh Soleimani Afshar and her daughter, who live a lavish lifestyle in Los Angeles, were nabbed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Friday as the US pushes to revoke green cards for foreign nationals with ties to Iran while locked in a war with the regime.

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is seeking Majid Dastjani Farahani, a 41-year-old Iranian national and intelligence agent, accused of orchestrating assassination plots against US officials. "Majid Dastjani Farahani, an Iranian intelligence officer, is wanted for questioning in connection with the recruitment of individuals for various operations in the United States, to include lethal targeting of current and former United States Government officials as revenge for the killing of IRGC-QF Commander Qasem Soleimani," it said in a report on March 5. Soleimani was killed in 2020 in Baghdad by an American airstrike. He was commander of the Islamic Revolutionary...

Iranian President Mohammad Khatami came to New York City on Nov. 8 to attend a U.N. summit as U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies explored new information tying his regime's intelligence services to Sept. 11 and to previous anti-American terrorist attacks, Insight has learned.The information is coming from a variety of sources and shows a clear pattern of operational contacts between the Iranian government and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization. These contacts include joint planning of terrorist operations, military training of bin Laden operatives inside Iran and by Iranian personnel in Syria and Lebanon, financial assistance to clandestine terrorist and surveillance ...

The retired CIA spy who says she led the team that helped draft the controversial 2016 U.S. intelligence community assessment on Russian election meddling has called Donald Trump a “dictator” and MAGA supporters “Nazis” — and insists that the now-discredited Steele dossier “might be true.” Susan Miller, a recently-retired CIA counterintelligence officer, has taken to social media and news media interviews in recent days to tell the story of how she was allegedly hand-picked by former CIA Director John Brennan to lead the team which helped draft the ICA in late 2016, gleefully exposing her anti-Trump sentiments. She has repeatedly...

Iraqi security forces were on Friday (June 26) interrogating pro-Iran fighters detained for planning a rocket attack in the first such raid in a country caught in the tug-of-war between Teheran and Washington. Since October, nearly three dozen deadly rocket attacks have hit US military and diplomatic installations in Iraq, with the US blaming pro-Teheran faction Kataeb Hezbollah. Infuriated, Washington has demanded Iraq take tougher action to hold the perpetrators accountable and Thursday's unprecedented raid appeared to be a response to this call. Just before midnight Thursday, the elite Counter-Terrorism Service stormed a base in southern Baghdad used by Kataeb...

Unidentified aircraft struck targets in Syria near the border with Iraq on Friday, killing eight Iran-backed Iraqi militiamen, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The rights group, which is based in the United Kingdom, obtains information through a network of activists on the ground in Syria, documenting the war in Syria over the past decade. The attack, carried out by “unknown drones,” targeted vehicles and armories, according to the organization. However, the head of the Syrian Observatory said it was “unidentified aircraft” that launched the attacks, without elaborating. “Unidentified aircraft targeted vehicles and arms depots in the Albu Kamal...

A contractor for the Pentagon has been charged with providing classified U.S. intelligence to a Lebanese national connected with terrorist group Hezbollah, the Justice Department announced on Wednesday. The department alleges Mariam Taha Thompson, 61, began transmitting the classified intelligence around December 30, when Iraqi militiamen stormed the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Thompson is a linguist who at the time was working at a U.S. special forces base in Erbil in northern Iraq. The classified “files contained classified national defense information including true names, personal identification data, background information, and photographs of the human sources, as well as operations cables...

A Minnesota woman pleaded guilty today to one count of delivering national defense information to aid a foreign government. According to court documents, Mariam Taha Thompson, 63, formerly of Rochester, Minnesota, worked as a contract linguist at an overseas U.S. military facility where she was entrusted with a top secret government security clearance. ***** In December 2019, while Thompson was assigned to a special operations task force facility in Iraq, the United States launched a series of airstrikes in Iraq targeting Kata’ib Hizballah, an Iranian-backed foreign terrorist organization. These airstrikes culminated in a Jan. 3, 2020, strike that resulted in...