WASHINGTON — The US State Department announced a $20 million reward on Thursday for information leading to the arrest of the alleged Iranian mastermind behind a plot to assassinate former White House official John Bolton.
US officials said in August 2022 that they had uncovered a plot by Shahram Poursafi, a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), to kill Bolton, who served as national security advisor to former US president Donald Trump.
The State Department’s “Rewards for Justice” program “is offering a reward of up to $20 million for information leading to the arrest or conviction” of Poursafi, a notice said Thursday.
The move comes as 78-year-old Trump, who is running for a new White House term, claimed there are “big threats” on his life by Iran.
Bolton, considered a foreign policy hawk, is a fierce critic of Iran and advocated that Trump unilaterally withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018.
Get The Times of Israel’s Daily Edition
by email and never miss our top stories
By signing up, you agree to the terms
Poursafi allegedly offered an unidentified person inside the US $300,000 to kill Bolton in the capital area.
This handout image provided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on August 10, 2022, shows the wanted poster of 45-year-old Shahram Poursafi. (FBI/AFP)
The plan was likely set in motion after the US killing of top Guards commander Qasem Soleimani in Iraq in January 2020, the Justice Department said at the time.
But it never made headway because the ostensible assassin became an informant of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Iranian authorities have dismissed the allegations as “fiction.”
The US designated the entire Revolutionary Guard a “foreign terrorist organization” in 2019, after previously designating its external operation, the Quds Force.
pdcc