An Iranian lawmaker says Tehran does not need to send agents to the US to take revenge on American officials, and can recruit operatives from among the people there. 

Mohammad Javad Karimi Ghoddousi (Qoddusi), a member of the Iranian parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, said that Iran does not need to send Revolutionary Guard forces to the US to kill officials because it will be very dangerous, instead “if we pay thugs in New York’s Manhattan, they can do the job for us too.”

Wrongly claiming that the US said a member of Iranian Revolutionary Guard was sent to assassinate John Bolton, the former United States National Security Advisor, he also denied any connection between Hadi Matar, the man who stabbed author Salman Rushdie last week in New York and the IRGC. 

A statement last week from the US Justice Department alleged that an IRGC operative had attempted to pay individuals in the United States” $300,000 to carry out Bolton’s killing, “likely in retaliation for the January 2020 death of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – Qods Force (IRGC-QF) commander Soleimani.”

Ghoddousi said that people like former president Donald Trump and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “deserve to die for their crimes,” particularly killing IRGC commander Qasem Soleimani, but the Islamic Republic has zealous supporters that back Tehran’s positions “and wherever they get this opportunity, they will take revenge on them.”

Bolton was National Security Advisor April 2018-September 2019 and was not in the post when President Donald Trump authorized the drone strike in Baghdad in which Soleimani and nine others died. The United Nations special rapporteur judged Soleimani’s death “unlawful killing.”