2 men face sentencing in plot to kill Iranian American journalist

NEW YORK (AP) — A plot to assassinate Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejad at her Brooklyn home came “chillingly near success,” prosecutors told a judge who will sentence two reputed Russian mobsters.

Prosecutors are seeking 55-year prison terms for Rafat Amirov, 46, and Polad Omarov, 41, at their sentencing on Wednesday in Manhattan federal court. Prosecutors said Amirov, of Iran, and Omarov, of Georgia, were crime bosses in the Russian mob.

Lawyers for Amirov say he should not spend more than 13 years behind bars. Omarov’s attorneys called for a 10-year prison sentence.

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.

Alinejad said in a message to supporters Tuesday that she planned to be in court to face the men prosecutors say 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.

“They’ll receive their sentence, and I’ll speak my truth in my impact statement,” she said.

Alinejad, 49, led online campaigns encouraging women in Iran to record videos of themselves exposing their hair to protest edicts for 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 in court documents that Alinejad was targeted by the Iranian government after she “dedicated her life to exposing the cruelty, corruption, and tyranny of the Islamic Republic.”

When Alinejad, Amirov and Omarov were offered the $500,000 bounty, they “appeared completely incurious about who they were plotting to murder and why,” prosecutors wrote.

“Amirov and Omarov were interested in one thing only: their own power and wealth,” they 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.”

Lawyers for Amirov said in court documents ahead of sentencing that no one was physically hurt and their client’s involvement in the plot was “minimal, if not non-existent.”

Lawyers for Omarov said he deserved leniency because his life had been threatened after a relative who was a reputed leader of the “thieves-in-law” criminal organization in Russia and Azerbaijan was killed in 2020. 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.