By Idrees Ali, Phil Stewart, Susan Heavey and Doina Chiacu
WASHINGTON, March 4 (Reuters) - The U.S. military has killed an Iranian official who headed a unit behind an alleged assassination plot against President Donald Trump, the Pentagon announced on Wednesday.
The announcement of the unnamed Iranian official's killing came during an operational update to the four-day-old war with Iran at the Pentagon.
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth touted the killing, which he said took place on Tuesday, even
as he stressed the Iranian official was not the initial focus of the war.
"The leader of the unit who attempted to assassinate President Trump has been hunted down and killed. Iran tried to kill President Trump and President Trump got the last laugh," Hegseth told reporters.
In 2024, the U.S. Justice Department charged an Iranian man in connection with an alleged plot ordered by Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps to assassinate Trump, then U.S. president-elect.
Tehran has denied accusations that it had targeted Trump and other U.S. officials.
Trump cited the alleged Iranian plot when he spoke on Sunday about a joint U.S.-Israeli operation that killed Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, saying to ABC News: "I got him before he got me."
Hegseth, however, said Trump never mentioned the effort to track down the leader of the Iranian unit behind the plot as a priority for the Pentagon.
"While that was not the focus of the effort by any stretch of the imagination - in fact, never raised by the President or anybody else - I ensured, and others ensured, that those who were responsible for that were eventually part of the target list," Hegseth told reporters.
General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the U.S. military was making steady progress against Iran after blistering rounds of strikes. He said Iran's launches of theater-wide ballistic missiles were down 86% from the first day of fighting and their one-way attack drone shots were down 73% from the opening days. He said U.S. strikes were expanding as the U.S. establishes localized air superiority across the southern Iranian coast.
"We will now begin to expand inland, striking progressively deeper into Iranian territory, and creating additional freedom of maneuver for U.S. forces," Caine said.
(Reporting by Phil Stewart, Idrees Ali, Susan Heavey and Doina Chiacu, editing by Michelle Nichols and Nick Zieminski)
