Trump says he has instructed that Iran be ‘obliterated’ if it assassinates him
The US president signed an executive order calling for the government to impose maximum pressure on Tehran.
US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that he has given his advisers instructions to obliterate Iran if it assassinates him.
“If they did that they would be obliterated,” Mr Trump said to reporters while signing an executive order calling for the US government to impose maximum pressure on Tehran.
“I’ve left instructions if they do it, they get obliterated, there won’t be anything left.”
The Justice Department announced in federal charges in November that an Iranian plot to kill Mr Trump before the presidential election had been thwarted.
The department alleged Iranian officials had instructed Farhad Shakeri, 51, in September, to focus on surveilling and ultimately assassinating Mr Trump.
Shakeri is still at large in Iran.
Iranian officials, at the time, dismissed the allegation, and foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei called the report a plot by Israel-linked circles to make Iran-US relations more complicated.
Investigators were told of the plan to kill Mr Trump by Shakeri, an accused Iranian government asset who spent time in US prisons for robbery and who authorities say maintained a network of criminal associates enlisted by Tehran for surveillance and murder-for-hire plots, according to the complaint.
Shakeri, an Afghan national living in Iran, told the FBI that a contact in Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard instructed him last September to set aside other work he was doing and assemble a plan within seven days to surveil and ultimately kill Mr Trump, according to a criminal complaint unsealed in federal court in Manhattan.
Federal authorities have been tracking Iranian threats against Mr Trump and other administration officials for years.
Mr Trump ordered the 2020 killing of Qassem Soleimani, who led the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force.
A threat on Mr Trump’s life from Iran prompted additional security in the days before a July campaign rally in Pennsylvania where he was shot in the ear, according to US officials.
But officials at the time said they did not believe Iran was connected to that assassination attempt.
Mr Trump recently revoked government security protection for former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and his top aide, Brian Hook, as well as his former national security adviser John Bolton, who have all faced threats from Iran after they took hardline stances against the Islamic Republic during Mr Trump’s first administration.
