NEW YORK — Plot to murder Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejad in her Brooklyn home, it came “scarily close to success,” prosecutors told the judge who will sentence the two alleged Russian mobsters.
Prosecutors are seeking 55 years in prison for Rafat Amirov, 46, and Polad OmarovThe 41-year-old man attends his sentencing Wednesday in Manhattan federal court. Prosecutors said Amirov, from Iran, and Omarov, from Georgia, were crime lords in the Russian mafia.
Amirov's lawyers say he should not spend more than 13 years behind bars. Omarov's lawyers demand that he be sentenced to 10 years in prison.
The men were convicted in a two-week trial in March that featured dramatic testimony from the gunman-for-hire and Alinejad, an author, activist and Voice of America contributor.
In an address to her supporters on Tuesday, Alinejad said she plans to go to trial to face men who prosecutors say are high-ranking members of the Gulichi, a faction of the Russian Mafia that has committed murder, assault, extortion, kidnapping, robbery and arson in the United States and abroad.
“They will get their sentence and I will tell the truth in my statement,” she said.
Alinejad, 49, has led online campaigns urging women in Iran to record videos of themselves baring their hair to protest edicts on public head coverings.
Prosecutors said Iranian intelligence officials first plotted in 2020 and 2021 to kidnap Alinejad in the United States and bring her to Iran to silence her criticism.
Iran offered $500,000 to try to kill Alinejad in July 2022 after efforts to harass, smear and intimidate her failed, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors said in court papers that Alinejad was targeted by the Iranian government after she “dedicated her life to exposing the brutality, corruption and tyranny of the Islamic Republic.”
When Alinejad, Amirov and Omarov were offered a $500,000 reward, they “appeared to have no interest in who they were plotting to kill or why,” prosecutors wrote.
“Amirov and Omarov were only interested in one thing: their own power and wealth,” they said.
Prosecutors said the plot “came frighteningly close to success,” thwarted only by the luck that Alinejad was out of town while the hitman persisted in trying to find her, and by “the diligence and tenacity of U.S. law enforcement officials who discovered and stopped the plot early.”
Amirov's lawyers said in court papers before the sentencing that no one was physically harmed and their client's involvement in the conspiracy was “minimal, if not non-existent.”
Omarov's lawyers said he deserves leniency because his life was at risk after a relative who was a reputed leader of the thieves in law gang in Russia and Azerbaijan was killed in 2020. Omarov was extradited to the United States in February 2024, a year after his arrest 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 she worked for was shut down.
Based in New York, she amassed an online audience of millions and launched the “My Hidden Freedom” campaign to encourage Iranian women to bare their hair when the morality police aren't around.
Prosecutors left 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 murder plot was uncovered.
