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NEW YORK >> Federal prosecutors in Manhattan said today that Iranian plotters had discussed a plan to assassinate Donald Trump before he was reelected as president this week.

One of the plotters said that he was assigned in September to carry out the plan by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, prosecutors said in court papers.

An Iranian operative said he was told to put aside other efforts he was undertaking on behalf of the Revolutionary Guard and “focus on surveilling, and ultimately, assassinating” Trump, according to a criminal complaint filed in Manhattan federal court.

The operative told a Revolutionary Guard official that such a plan would cost a “huge” amount of money, the complaint said. In response, the official said, “We have already spent a lot of money,” adding that “money’s not an issue.”

The new allegation about a plan to kill Trump is the latest alarming development for U.S. security officials, who have been concerned since the summer that Iran appeared to be escalating plans for violence inside the United States, including against the president-elect, who has been Tehran’s nemesis.

In his first term as president, Trump abandoned a nuclear deal that required Iran to limit its nuclear capacity. He levied 1,500 sanctions, including on oil sales and banking, debilitating the Iranian economy. And he ordered the assassination of a military leader, Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who had been designated as a terrorist.

This year, Iranian hackers breached Trump’s campaign and spread disinformation about the election. Officials said today that Tehran was willing to go further.

“The charges announced today expose Iran’s continued brazen attempts to target U.S. citizens, including President-elect Donald Trump, other government leaders and dissidents who criticize the regime in Tehran,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said.

Iran “has been conspiring with criminals and hit men to target and gun down Americans on U.S. soil and that simply won’t be tolerated,” he said.

The newly unsealed complaint also contains allegations that authorities had disrupted another plot to assassinate Masih Alinejad, a Brooklyn human-rights activist who has long criticized Iran’s repression of women.

The man prosecutors said was tasked with the plot to kill Trump and Alinejad was Farhad Shakeri, 51. Shakeri, following a guilty plea to robbery, spent 14 years in New York state prisons, according to the complaint. Prosecutors said he was at large and is believed to reside in Iran.

Two men also charged in the plots were arrested and are in custody in New York. They are Carlisle Rivera, 49, of Brooklyn, and Jonathan Loadholt, 36, of Staten Island.

The three men each face charges of murder-for-hire, conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire and money laundering conspiracy. Shakeri was also charged with providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization, identified as the Revolutionary Guard, and conspiring to do so, as well as conspiracy to violate U.S. sanctions on Iran.

Rivera and Loadholt were each presented before a federal magistrate judge in Manhattan on Thursday and ordered to be detained pending trial. Their lawyers did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Shakeri’s time in prison overlapped with Rivera, who was convicted in 1994 of second-degree murder, the complaint says.

The document also says that beginning in September, Shakeri, who was in Tehran, spoke voluntarily by telephone with FBI agents on five dates, including as recently as Thursday. His stated reason for agreeing to be interviewed, the complaint said, was to seek a sentence reduction for another federal prisoner.

Shakeri told the FBI that he was directed to provide a plan within seven days to kill Trump during a meeting with a Revolutionary Guard official on Oct. 7, according to the complaint.

If Shakeri was unable to put forth a plan within that time frame, the document says, the official said that the Revolutionary Guard would “pause its plan” until after the U.S. presidential elections.

Shakeri said the official told him that Trump would lose the election and that afterward “it would be easier to assassinate” him, according to the complaint.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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