Masih Alinejad Wiki, Biography
US prosecutors have charged three members of an Eastern European criminal organization with ties to Iran’s government with conspiring to kill a US citizen journalist and activist, Attorney General Merrick Garland said Friday.
Rafat Amirov, Polad Omarov, and Khalid Mehdiyev were charged with murder for hire and money laundering for their roles in the Tehran-backed foiled plot, the Justice Department said in a statement.
“The victim publicized [the] Iranian government’s human rights abuses, discriminatory treatment of women, suppression of democratic participation and expression, and the use of arbitrary imprisonment, torture, and execution,” Garland said.
“This activity posed such a threat to the government of Iran that the chief judge of Iran’s revolutionary courts warned that anyone who sent videos to the victim criticizing the regime would be sentenced to prison.”
Garland did not name the alleged victim, but Mehdiyev was arrested last year in New York for having a rifle outside the Brooklyn home of journalist Masih Alinejad, a longtime critic of Iran’s head-covering laws and has promoted videos of women violating those laws on social media. media.
Alinejad told Reuters she was invited to FBI headquarters in Manhattan on Friday morning, where a dozen agents described the details of the alleged plot to her.
In July, the men had planned to lure Alinejad from her home by asking her for flowers from her garden and then gun her down, authorities said.
Her elaborate garden is well known in the neighborhood: each section is dedicated to a family in Iran from whom she has been separated for 13 years. The assailants had been monitoring the property and may have observed that she often shares flowers with her neighbors, she said.
But she saw the assailants guarding her home and fled, authorities said. “Imagine if they had opened fire,” she said. “How many of my beautiful neighbors would have died. My stepsons?
Alinejad said the assassination attempt shows that Iran is terrified of Iranian women demanding their rights, which he often promotes through social media. “They are afraid of their own people,” he said. “Like millions of people, I want freedom for my country. I don’t deserve to die for that.
Mehdiyev pleaded not guilty to one charge of possession of a firearm with a defaced serial number. He is being held at the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center awaiting trial. Iran’s mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In 2021, US prosecutors charged four Iranians believed to be Tehran intelligence agents with conspiring to kidnap a New York-based journalist and activist. While the target of the plot was not named, Reuters confirmed that it was Alinejad.
Amirov was arrested Thursday and will have a pretrial hearing in federal court in Manhattan later Friday. Omarov was arrested in the Czech Republic earlier this month and the United States is seeking his extradition.
The United States in 2011 arrested a man he said was linked to an Iranian plot to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s then-ambassador to Washington at a restaurant he frequented in the capital. Washington accuses Tehran of supporting terrorism and seeking nuclear weapons, charges that Iran denies.
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