Masih Alinejad started rattling Iran’s rulers as a teenager. Now, men whom prosecutors say arranged for an assassin to kill her in New York are on trial in Manhattan.
Masih Alinejad started rattling Iran’s rulers as a teenager. Now, men whom prosecutors say arranged for an assassin to kill her in New York are on trial in Manhattan.
Masih Alinejad started rattling Iran’s rulers as a teenager. Now, men whom prosecutors say arranged for an assassin to kill her in New York are on trial in Manhattan.
Just a few wisps of Masih Alinejad’s hair were visible as she walked in Iran with her brother one day over a decade ago. That was enough for the morality police.
“They beat up my brother in front of me,” Ms. Alinejad, an Iranian-born dissident, testified in Manhattan this week.
For over a week, jurors in Federal District Court have heard witnesses in the murder-for-hire trial of two members of the Russian mob, Rafat Amirov and Polad Omarov, who stand accused of trying to kill Ms. Alinejad on behalf of influential figures in Iran.
The plot unraveled in 2022, when a man named Khalid Mehdiyev was arrested near Ms. Alinejad’s Brooklyn home with an assault rifle after going onto her porch and trying to open the door.
An indictment said that men led by a brigadier general in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps gave Mr. Amirov the assignment to murder Ms. Alinejad. Prosecutors said he then contacted Mr. Omarov, who gave the job to Mr. Mehdiyev.
Testimony in the trial has come from F.B.I. agents; an expert on Russian mobsters who call themselves Thieves-in-Law; and Mr. Mehdiyev, a member of that group who is cooperating with the government and implicated his fellow mobsters.
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