NEW YORK (AP) — Two purported Russian mobsters were each sentenced to 25 years behind bars Wednesday for hiring a hitman to kill Iranian American journalist Masih Alinejad at her Brooklyn home three years ago on behalf of the Iranian government.
“I crossed an ocean to come to America and have a normal life and I don’t have a normal life,” Alinejad said just before Judge Colleen McMahon announced the sentences in Manhattan federal court for Rafat Amirov, 46, and Polad Omarov, 41.
“I’m a brave woman. I’m a strong woman. They couldn’t break me. But they brought fear to my life. These criminals turned my life upside down,” Alinejad said as she spoke at a lectern near the men, who sat in prison uniforms with their hands folded before them. She urged the judge to send a message “to the regime and the women of Iran.”
Judge calls assassination plot a “terrible, terrible crime”
McMahon said the men had committed a “terrible, terrible crime” and that she hoped her sentence would alert foreign gangs and foreign powers “that this kind of conduct will not be tolerated by the United States.”
Outside the courthouse afterward, Alinejad appeared at a bank of microphones with Barry Rosen, one of more than 50 Americans who were seized in Iran in 1979 and held hostage for more than a 14 months.
“Justice is beautiful,” Alinejad said as she held a yellow sunflower someone had given her. She said Rosen, who had a gun held to his head when he was a hostage, “is here to stand by my side to see justice.”
Rosen called Alinejad “one of the most important people in the world” for her efforts to give voice to the voiceless in Iran and elsewhere around the globe.
At the sentencing proceeding, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael D. Lockard had urged McMahon to send the convicted men away for 55 years. He said Iranian leaders had hoped to silence a woman who has a bigger social media following than the supreme leader of Iran.
Prosecutor: assassination plot was a message to all women in Iran
Lockard said the intended target of the assassination plot was not just Alinejad, “but those millions of people who look to Masih Alinejad to be their voice, to promote their cause and to shine a light on the corrupt and deadly tactics of the government of Iran.”
Prosecutors said Amirov, of Iran, and Omarov, of Georgia, were crime bosses in the Russian mob, motivated by $500,000 offered for the death of Alinejad.
Before he was sentenced, Amirov urged the judge not to “take into account only my associations” and to understand that the descriptions of violence associated with the mob “is not who we are.” His lawyers requested he serve no more than 13 years in prison.
Omarov declined to speak. His lawyer, Elena Fast, said her client should not be imprisoned for more than 10 years.
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.
Prosecutors said the men 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.
Alinejad, 49, has led online campaigns encouraging women in Iran to record videos of themselves exposing their hair to protest edicts that demand 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.
Assassination plot followed earlier attempts to silence Alinejad
Iran offered a half million dollars in July 2022 to kill Alinejad after efforts to harass, smear and intimidate her failed, prosecutors said.
In court papers, 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.”
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 outside the courthouse that she wore a red coat for symbolic reasons, “because the killers wanted to see me covered with blood; they wanted to see me dead on my porch in Brooklyn.”
Alinejad plans to continue her quest to give voice to the voiceless
Now, she said, she’ll continue her quest to inspire and help the women she left behind in Iran, where she said the American hostages were released by a regime that then took all of its citizens hostage.
Alinejad described how she had to leave her Brooklyn home and the neighbors who rallied around her after the assassination attempt was revealed and said she has since moved 21 times.
The moves, she said, have left her with guilt and trauma because she worries that she has ruined her husband’s life.
The continuous threat to her life has left her unable to experience some simple joys, like carefree bicycle rides with the wind in her hair.
“Now I cannot do that because of these criminals,” she said. “I have to look over my shoulder.”
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An earlier version of this story was updated to correct that prosecutors wrote that Amirov and Omarov were offered a bounty, not Alinejad, Amirov and Omarov.
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