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NEW YORK: A US judge jailed two men for 25 years each Wednesday for a plot allegedly hatched by Tehran to kill Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejad, her team confirmed to AFP.
Rafat Amirov and Polad Omarov, both members of an eastern European criminal gang, orchestrated a failed plot to assassinate campaigning reporter Alinejad.
“They wanted to see me dead on my porch in Brooklyn and thanks to the law enforcement agencies, I am alive and Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader (of Iran), is humiliated,” Alinejad said outside a Manhattan courthouse following the sentencing, brandishing a sunflower.
“I was nervous but at the same time very empowered to speak the truth,” she added before dancing and singing in Farsi.
Amirov and Omarov were both jailed for 25 years, a spokesman for Alinejad said following the hearing, after prosecutors had sought 55-year terms for each, according to court filings.
According to the Justice Department, the jailed men, members of the eastern European crime network, were “contracted” by Ruhollah Bazghandi — identified as a brigadier general in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards — and other members of his network to murder Alinejad.
In July 2022, a man hired to carry out the assassination was arrested near Alinejad’s New York home with a loaded AK-47 assault rifle, the court heard over the two week trial.
The 49-year-old Alinejad, one of the most prominent dissident campaigners against Iranian authorities, for years has pushed for the abolition of the obligatory headscarf in Iran under the banner of “MyStealthyFreedom.”
She left Iran in 2009.
Charges were unsealed in October 2024 against Bazghandi, a former intelligence officer.
Three other Iranians with “connections to the government of Iran” — Hajj Taher, Hossein Sedighi and Seyed Mohammad Forouzan — were indicted over the affair.
The three are not in US custody and are believed to be in Iran. They face charges of conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire and money laundering.
Tehran has routinely rejected similar US accusations about alleged plots to kill American officials or politicians in the past.
The United States has also accused Iran of seeking to assassinate US officials in retaliation for Washington’s killing of Revolutionary Guards commander Qasem Soleimani in 2020.
The State Department previously announced a $20 million reward for information leading to the arrest of the alleged Iranian mastermind behind a plot to assassinate former White House official John Bolton.