Asif Merchant pleads not guilty to US assassination plot charges

• Merchant entered his plea to attempting terror, murder for hire.
• A judge in US court orders that defendant be detained pending trial.
• Prosecutors alleged suspect spent time in Iran before coming to US. 

Asif Merchant, a Pakistani man with alleged ties to Iran pleaded not guilty on Monday to charges stemming from an alleged plot to assassinate an American politician in retaliation for the killing of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards top commander Qassem Soleimani.

Merchant, 46, entered his plea to one count of attempting to commit terrorism across national boundaries and one count of murder for hire at a hearing before US Magistrate Judge Robert Levy in Brooklyn.

The judge ordered that Merchant be detained pending trial.

Federal prosecutors allege Merchant spent time in Iran before travelling to the United States to recruit people for the plot.

Merchant told a confidential informant he also planned to steal documents from one target and organize protests in the United States, prosecutors said.

The defendant named Donald Trump as a potential target but had not conceived the scheme as a plan to assassinate the former president, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Court papers do not name the alleged targets, and no attacks were made. As president, Trump had in 2020 approved the drone strike on Soleimani.

There are no suggestions that Merchant was tied to an apparent assassination attempt on Trump at his Florida golf course on Sunday, or a separate shooting of the Republican presidential candidate at a rally in Pennsylvania in July.

Merchant was arrested in Texas on July 15.

Iran’s mission to the United Nations said in August that the “modus operandi” described in Merchant’s court papers ran contrary to Tehran’s policy of “legally prosecuting the murder of General Soleimani.”