Excerpt
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): The country's top law enforcement officials accused Iran today of fomenting a terror plot inside the U.S. -- the targets, the ambassador to Washington from Saudi Arabia and possibly two embassies.
The announcement came from Attorney General Eric Holder. Two men have been charged, both of Iranian background. Manssor Arbabsiar was arrested last month at New York's Kennedy International Airport. He's a naturalized U.S. citizen who also holds an Iranian passport. The other, Gholam Shakuri, is a member of the Quds Force, the special operations unit of Iran's Revolutionary Guard. He remains at large.
The men are accused of plotting to assassinate Adel Al-Jubeir, the Saudi ambassador to the United States. U.S. officials said they also talked of trying to bomb the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Washington, D.C. According to the complaint, no one, including the ambassador, was ever in any immediate danger.
Attorney General Holder said today there is no question where the plot originated.
ERIC HOLDER, U.S. attorney general: The complaint alleges that this conspiracy was conceived, was sponsored, and was directed from Iran, and constitutes a flagrant violation of U.S. and international law, including a convention that explicitly protects diplomats from being harmed. In addition to holding these individual conspirators accountable for their alleged role in this plot, the United States is committed to holding Iran accountable for its actions.
Also, on Manssor Arbabsiar
"Unlikely Turn for a Suspect in a Terror Plot" by ROBERT F. WORTH and LAURA TILLMAN, New York Times 10/12/2011
Excerpt
His nickname was Scarface, the legacy of a brutal knife attack on a dark Houston street three decades ago that left his left cheek permanently marred. Friends and neighbors in Texas said that he could be gruff and intimidating, and that he often stood outside his house at night smoking and talking on his cellphone in a language they did not understand.
But Mansour J. Arbabsiar, 56, the man at the center of an alleged Iranian plot to kill a Saudi diplomat in Washington, seems to have been more a stumbling opportunist than a calculating killer. Over the 30-odd years he lived in Texas, he left a string of failed businesses and angry creditors in his wake, and an embittered ex-wife who sought a protective order against him. He was perennially disheveled, friends and acquaintances said, and hopelessly disorganized.
Mr. Arbabsiar, now in custody in New York, stands accused by federal prosecutors of running a global terrorist plot that stretched from Mexico to Tehran, and that was directed by the Quds Force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Many of his old friends and associates in Texas seemed stunned at the news, not merely because he was not a zealot, but because he seemed too incompetent to pull it off.
“His socks would not match,” said Tom Hosseini, a former college roommate and friend. “He was always losing his keys and his cellphone. He was not capable of carrying out this plan.”
On Wednesday, American officials, who say the plot was endorsed by top Iranian authorities, were exploring why the sophisticated Quds Force might have chosen to rely on so amateurish an agent as Mr. Arbabsiar.
Sometime in the past two years, Mr. Arbabsiar, whose friends called him Jack, began spending time in his native Iran, and investigators say he formed a relationship with members of the Quds Force. But Mr. Hosseini, who last saw his old roommate about two months ago, said Mr. Arbabsiar appeared to be chasing money, not political intrigue.
“He said he’d been in Iran and was making good money,” Mr. Hosseini said.
The federal complaint against Mr. Arbabsiar did not say how much money he stood to be paid by the Iranians, who are accused of asking him to pay $1.5 million to a Mexican drug cartel to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States. That money was involved was not a surprise to Mr. Arbabsiar’s old friends, who said he had no interest in religion or politics, and smoked marijuana and drank alcohol freely.
“He was no radical,” said Mitchell Hamauei, who owns a deli in Corpus Christi, Tex., where Mr. Arbabsiar ran a used-car lot for years. “He was a businessman, and people with money always want to make more money.”
Some of Mr. Arbabsiar’s former friends and acquaintances had a few kind words for him, saying that he was friendly and good-humored, and that his flaws were more a matter of carelessness than malevolence.
Others were less charitable, saying he was hopelessly unreliable. Sam Ragsdale, who runs his own wholesale car business in Corpus Christi, had one word for Mr. Arbabsiar: “Worthless.”
Mr. Arbabsiar’s arrest sent shock waves across the Middle East — where the accusations seemed certain to worsen Iran’s relations with both the United States and Saudi Arabia — and in the narrower confines of Central Texas, home to a substantial population of Iranian immigrants.
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