US offers $20 mn for info on Iranian behind Bolton assassination plot

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 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.

Poursafi allegedly offered an unidentified person inside the United States $300,000 to kill Bolton in the capital area.

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 United States has designated the entire Revolutionary Guard a "foreign terrorist organization" in 2019, after previously designating its external operation, the Quds Force.