The FBI has mastered the art of sting operations by watching thousands of Hollywood thrillers, it would seem.
While it has reeled in a slew of would-be home-grown terrorists through elaborate, complex plots, its most recent success in this modus operandi was the dramatic arrest of Iranian-American Manssor Arbabsiar, a used-car salesman who purportedly hatched a $1.5- million scheme to assassinate Saudi Arabia's Ambassador on U.S. soil.
On Tuesday U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced that Arbabsiar a naturalised U.S. citizen had been accused of working with the Quds section of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps to devise an international murder-for-hire scheme targeting Saudi Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir.
The remarkable and cinematic twist in the tale was that Arbabsiar reportedly sought to recruit a Mexican drug cartel to help carry out the assassination, and in the course of such recruitment met an undercover agent of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency.
Following initial contact with the DEA agent in May, Arbabsiar, who was backed by his co-accused in this case, Quds member Gholam Shakuri in Iran, flitted between the U.S. and Mexico and discussed several “violent missions.”
When the informant in the case informant told Arbabsiar that his men had carried out surveillance in Washington and other areas and persons, including U.S. Senators who dined at the Ambassador's preferred restaurant, and could be killed in an attack at that location, Arbabsiar allegedly dismisses the concerns as “no big deal.”
The entrapment of Arbabsiar and his Iranian co-conspirator was complete when Shakuri sent $100,000 via two wire transfers to a New York bank, as payment for ostensible hired guns. Arbabsiar was arrested on his return from Mexico to the U.S., whereas Shakuri was said to be in Iran.
Scepticism
The announcement of the Arbabsiar case was greeted with scepticism from Iran, with Ali Akbar Javanfekr, a high-ranking adviser and spokesperson for Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, describing alleged terror plot “a fabrication.”
He said in a press conference that the U.S had used the bomb threat to distract the American population from “domestic issues,” and confirmed that the Iranian government is awaiting details on the case.
However U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said that the defendants were part of a “well-funded and pernicious plot that had, as its first priority, the assassination of the Saudi Ambassador to the United States, without care or concern for the mass casualties that would result from their planned attack,” adding that the charges would “make crystal clear that we will not let other countries use our soil as their battleground.”
