Russian mobsters sentenced to 25 years for foiled plot to assassinate Iranian dissident journalist
NEW YORK (AP) — Two purported Russian mobsters were each sentenced to 25 years behind bars Wednesday for hiring a hitman to kill Iranian American journalist Masih Alinejad at her Brooklyn home three years ago on behalf of the Iranian government.
“I crossed an ocean to come to America and have a normal life and I don’t have a normal life,” Alinejad said just before Judge Colleen McMahon announced the sentences in Manhattan federal court for Rafat Amirov, 46, and Polad Omarov, 41.
“I’m a brave woman. I’m a strong woman. They couldn’t break me. But they brought fear to my life. These criminals turned my life upside down,” Alinejad said as she spoke at a lectern near the men, who sat in prison uniforms with their hands folded before them.
McMahon said the men had committed a “terrible, terrible crime.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael D. Lockard had urged McMahon to dispense 55-year prison terms to the men. He said they were willing to carry out the desires of Iran to silence Alinejad, who has an online following of millions of people, more than the supreme leader of Iran.
Lockard said the intended target of the assassination plot was not just Alinejad, “but those millions of people who look to Masih Alinejad to be their voice, to promote their cause and to shine a light on the corrupt and deadly tactics of the government of Iran.”
Prosecutors said Amirov, of Iran, and Omarov, of Georgia, were crime bosses in the Russian mob.
Attorney Michael Martin, representing Amirov, said he should not spend more than 13 years behind bars.
“Punishing Mr. Amirov harshly will not ultimately send a message to Iran. He does not share their ideology,” he said.
Omarov's lawyer, Elena Fast, said her client should not serve more than 10 years behind bars.
The men were convicted in a two-week March trial that featured dramatic testimony from a hired gunman and Alinejad, an author, activist and contributor to Voice of America.
Prosecutors said the men were high-ranking members of the Gulici, a faction of the Russian Mob that carried out murders, assaults, extortions, kidnappings, robberies and arsons in the United States and abroad.
Alinejad, 49, has led online campaigns encouraging women in Iran to record videos of themselves exposing their hair to protest edicts that demand head coverings in public.
Prosecutors said Iranian intelligence officials first plotted in 2020 and 2021 to kidnap Alinejad in the U.S. and move her to Iran to silence her criticism.
Iran offered $500,000 in a July 2022 attempt to kill Alinejad after efforts to harass, smear and intimidate her failed, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors said the plot “came chillingly near success,” interrupted only by the luck that Alinejad was out of town while a hired gunman tried persistently to locate her and because of the “diligence and tenacity of American law enforcement, which detected and disrupted the plot in time.”
Omarov was extradited to the U.S. in February 2024, a year after he was detained in the Czech Republic.
Alinejad testified at the March trial that she came to the United States in 2009 after she was banned from covering Iran’s disputed presidential election and the newspaper where she worked was shut down.
Establishing herself in New York City, she built an online audience of millions and launched her “My Stealthy Freedom” campaign to encourage Iranian women to expose their hair when the morality police were not around.
Prosecutors have kept the investigation open. In October 2024, they announced charges against a senior Iranian military official and three others, none of whom are in custody.
Alinejad said she has moved nearly two dozen times since the assassination plot was discovered. ___ A previous version of this story was updated to correct that prosecutors wrote that Amirov and Omarov were offered a bounty, not Alinejad, Amirov and Omarov.
