Man Sentenced to 25 Years for Plot to Kill Saudi Ambassador

An Iranian-American used-car salesman from Texas who was accused of plotting to hire assassins from a Mexican drug cartel to murder Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Thursday in Federal Court in Manhattan.

The man, Mansour J. Arbabsiar, a naturalized American citizen living in Corpus Christi, Tex., was arrested on Sept. 29, 2011, at Kennedy International Airport and ultimately pleaded guilty to his role in the bizarre scheme.

When the case, with a plotline that seemed scripted from a Hollywood movie, was made public it riveted Washington and raised already heightened tensions between the Sunni royal family that rules Saudi Arabia and the Shiite-controlled government in Iran.

At the time of Mr. Arbabsiar’s arrest, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said that the plot had been “directed and approved by elements of the Iranian government and, specifically, senior members of the Quds force,” which is part of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

The Iranian government has denied that it had anything to do with the plot.

The plan, according to government officials, involved Mr. Arbabsiar paying a member of the Los Zetas drug cartel $1.5 million to plant a bomb at a Washington restaurant while the Saudi ambassador, Adel al-Jubeir, dined. However, Mr. Arbabsiar’s contact with the Mexican cartel turned out to be an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration, who quickly alerted United States authorities.

The authorities said Mr. Arbabsiar had confessed to his role in the plot and provided valuable intelligence about Iran’s role in supporting the plan. He claimed that his cousin, a member of the Quds Force, recruited him to carry out the plot, according to the authorities.

That man, Gholam Shakuri, remains at large.

After Mr. Arbabsiar’s arrest, the authorities said that he “knowingly and voluntarily” waived his rights to remain silent, to have a lawyer present during his interrogation and to be taken speedily before a judge, and that he provided his cooperation.

Though Mr. Arbabsiar, 58, was originally charged with offenses that carried a maximum sentence of life in prison, he ultimately pleaded guilty in October 2012 to three counts for which he faced a maximum of 25 years. The charges included conspiracy to commit an act of terrorism transcending national boundaries and two counts related to murder-for-hire.

After Mr. Arbabsiar pleaded guilty, the case has focused on whether he should receive 25 years, as the United States attorney’s office had sought, or less.

The defense had sought a 10-year term, arguing, among other things, that Mr. Arbabsiar’s crime had been the result of a longstanding, untreated bipolar disorder, and that when he was recruited into the plot by his cousin in Iran, he was in a deep depression after business failures and the deaths of his best friend and his father.

“He felt like a complete failure,” Dr. Michael B. First, a Columbia University professor of clinical psychiatry retained by the defense, testified in a presentence hearing on May 8. “He was extremely down on himself. His life was a wreck. He hated himself. He was having suicidal thoughts.”

In a report filed with the judge, Dr. First quoted from interviews he had conducted with Mr. Arbabsiar, who recalled his cousin’s asking for his assistance and his feeling immediately uplifted. “Here was my cousin, a very powerful man in Iran, with connections to the government and Army, asking me to help him,” Mr. Arbabsiar said. He said that he felt he had “a purpose” and that it was “like a drug to me,” like he had been given cocaine, he said.

But a psychiatrist retained by the government, Dr. Gregory B. Saathoff of the University of Virginia, disagreed with the defense expert’s findings, testifying in another hearing on Wednesday that he did not believe Mr. Arbabsiar was suffering from a bipolar disorder.

Dr. Saathoff met with Mr. Arbabsiar last year over six sessions for a total of about 32 hours, according to a report he filed last October, when Mr. Arbabsiar’s lawyer, Sabrina Shroff, a federal public defender, was seeking to have his statements to the Federal Bureau of Investigation suppressed on grounds that he was suffering from a serious mental illness when he agreed to cooperate with the authorities after his arrest after waving his right to a lawyer or a speedy court appearance.

Dr. Saathoff said in his report that he had concluded that “Mr. Arbabsiar does not suffer from bipolar disorder or any other mental illness that would have precluded him from knowingly consenting to F.B.I. questioning following his arrest without the presence of an attorney.”

His interviews with Mr. Arbabsiar, as summarized in the report, offered an unusually candid look at the man prosecutors described as the alleged assassin.

In one unusual incident, Mr. Arbabsiar told the doctor he had been on a flight from Europe to Iran around 2004, and bought duty-free cologne for the pilot and a flight attendant. Calling the gift a “nice gesture,” the pilot invited Mr. Arbabsiar into the cockpit and allowed him to sit in the co-pilot’s seat and even gave him “a special tour at the controls,” Dr. Saathoff wrote.

Mr. Arbabsiar told Dr. Saathoff that he felt his crime, because it involved the planned assassination of a Saudi official, “felt that it would have the attention of top U.S. leadership, including President Obama.”

The psychiatrist said that Mr. Arbabsiar had also talked about how he had made a mistake and was hoping for leniency from the judge.

“'We all make mistakes. Some are big and some are little,'” Dr. Saathoff quoted Mr. Arbabsiar as saying. “'I know that this is a big mistake, so I felt, ‘Yes, O.K., put me in jail. Just not for too long.'”