The Iranian dissident and journalist, Masih Alinejad, faced the two men accused of plotting to assassinate her on behalf of the Iranian government at their trial on Tuesday. The journalist told the jury how she saw the hitman, who’d allegedly been hired to shoot her, in her driveway and about her decade-long campaign against Iran’s strict hijab law that forces women to wear the religious headdress.
“You can put that thing down now,” the presiding district judge, Colleen McMahon, told a detective, who was on the witness stand before Ms. Alinejad testified, holding an assault rifle in his hands.
Federal prosecutors had asked the detective from the New York Police Department, Roger Nehl, to demonstrate to the jury how easily one could fire the AK-47 style assault rifle, a semi-automatic Norinco, which was made in China. A defense attorney, Michael Perkins, pointed out that the firearm which was confiscated from the alleged assassin’s Subaru,
“was not in great physical condition.” It was still rather threatening.
It was the second time during the trial, currently underway at a federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan, that prosecutors showed the intimidatingly long weapon to the jurors. The first time was last week, when another NYPD detective, Daniel Smith, held it up.
Mr. Smith was the officer who found the rifle, fully loaded, when he stopped the suspected hitman, Khalid Mehdiyev, in July of 2022, after speeding through a stop sign. Mr. Mehdiyev would later tell prosecutors he had been hired to assassinate Ms. Alinejad outside of her home in Brooklyn. Thankfully, the police beat him to the punch. It’s unclear who informed detectives of the “suspicious activity” in front of Ms. Alinejad’s home, which had led detectives to patrol the area. Mr. Mehdiyev, 27, eventually pleaded guilty to all charges and has been cooperating with the government in the hopes for a lighter sentence.
After the jury had been reminded of the size of the firearm, and seen the bullets also found in Mr. Mehdiyev’s car, prosecutors called Ms. Alinejad to the witness stand, where she directly faced the two men who are charged with having hired Mr. Mehdiyev to murder her.
The two Azerbaijani self-professed mobsters, Polad Omariv, 40, and Rafat Amirov, 46, were living overseas, where they were arrested. They have been brought to New York to stand trial for numerous federal charges, including murder-for-hire, conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire, and money laundering. They have both pleaded not-guilty.
“It’s very nerve wracking for me and for my wife,” Ms. Alinejad’s husband, Kambiz Foroohar told the Sun during a break, “to come so close to the guys who plotted to kill us.”
Ms. Alinejad had never seen Mr. Omarov or Mr. Amirov in person before Tuesday. But she did see Mr. Mehdiyev in her driveway shortly before he was arrested.
“He was gigantic,” Ms. Alinejad testified, as she described the day she encountered him. Mr. Mehdiyev’s ID card from the federal detention center in Brooklyn, where he was detained, listed his weight, 280 pounds, and height, 5 feet,11 inches.
According to his own testimony and text messages he sent to one of the defendants, Mr. Omarov, as the Sun reported, Mr. Mehdiyev started loitering around Ms. Alinejad’s home on about July 13, 2022, continuing for more than two weeks until the day of his arrest on July 28, 2022.
While the hitman was sitting in his car with his big loaded rifle, waiting to kill her, Ms. Alinejad had traveled to San Francisco for a week, she testified. Back in New York, around July 26 or 27, she ran into him in her drive-way.
“I was with a friend, and I went to my backyard garden,” she said. “I just had all the tomatoes, basil, cucumbers in my hands. I was walking to go to my inside door. When I was walking in the drive path, I saw the guy — the big guy.”
Ms. Alinejad thought the big guy (Mr. Mehdiyev) was talking to her, but soon realized he was talking on the phone, so she went back inside her house. Once in her kitchen, she remembered she had accidently left the keys in the door, and rushed back to the porch. That’s when she saw Mr. Mehdiyev was standing in her front yard garden.
“He was like, in the sunflowers, staring into my eyes,” Ms. Alinejad said. “Then I got really panicked, but I didn’t know anything… There are a lot of people taking photos of my garden.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Mehdiyev was sending photographs and videos, according to evidence shown by the prosecution, to Mr. Omarov, attesting that he was indeed at the home of their target, waiting for her to come outside, so he could shoot her. Why he didn’t shoot her the day he ran into her, is unclear. Indeed, as Mr. Mehdiyev testified, he told his partner lie after lie about stalking his prey.
Regardless of Mr. Mehdiyev’s intentions, Ms. Alinejad “has long been a target” of the Iranian regime, the indictment states. In 2018, prosecutors wrote, “Iranian government officials attempted to induce relatives of hers,” who live in Iran, to invite her to travel to a third country, “for the apparent purpose” of arresting her and getting her extradited to Iran. The indictment also mentions a case from 2020 and 2021, which resulted in criminal charges, where “Iranian government intelligence service plotted to kidnap” Ms. Alinejad “for rendition to Iran and likely execution.”
“I am a journalist and women’s rights activist. I was born in a small village in Iran. I grew up in Northern Iran.” Ms. Alinejad said as she began to explain to the jury why the Iranian regime is after her. “My focus was on politics. I used to go to the Iranian parliament and report on the Iranian parliament.”
She was visibly nervous at the beginning of her testimony, breathing heavily. She wore a black dress and a glowing white scarf, matching the white orchid she frequently wears in her epically frizzy, wild and free hair. Her voice, though trembling at times, maintained its naturally cheerful tone.
“Does the government (in Iran) have a role in what stories can be published?” Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Lockard asked.
“You cannot write about the nuclear deal. You cannot write about (the) hijab,” Ms. Alinejad answered, referring to the head covering, which is mandatory for Iranian women. “We don’t have free media in Iran … The Supreme leader appoints the head of television … The media is directly ruled by the government.”
“Did you ever get in trouble for crossing red lines?” Mr. Lockard asked.
“Always.” She testified. “I got kicked out of the parliament… I was criticizing members of the parliament… One member even said I am gonna punch you in your face if you don’t cover your hair properly.” She added, “I mean, I have a lot of hair.” And the audience in the courtroom, which was packed with her friends, laughed.
She told the jury about an incident where she was arrested and got “74 lashes” for reading banned books. The “Revolutionary court” accused her of having committed “an act against national security,” because she went against the Sharia, a body of islamic laws, derived from the Quran.
“They said you’re waging war against God,” Ms. Alinejad testified.
During the national elections in 2009, she was told not to cover the them. “We don’t have free elections,” she said. “The dictator is picking the candidates … Women cannot run. Minorities cannot run. Except when they believe in the Supreme Leader … I had to sign an agreement that I won’t cover the election … They vandalized my car in front of my house. I had no choice but to leave Iran.”
In exile, Ms. Alinejad continued to speak out against the Iranian regime. “I started my activism on social media,” she said on Tuesday. She started a project dedicated to the victims who were killed during the protests that broke out following the 2009 elections. And she started a campaign. My Stealthy Freedom, against compulsory veiling.
She currently has over 8.7 million followers on Instagram and over 700,000 followers on X. “I call my social media… my weapon,” she said.
“First they (the Iranian regime) tried to downplay me by calling me a prostitute,” she explained. But soon the police started arresting the Iranian women who were sharing videos with Ms. Alinejad on social media, some of which showed these women, inside Iran, defiantly removing their hijabs. “In one day they arrested 29 women… They created a law in my name,” she said.
Prosecutors showed the jury a translated speech, in which the former head of the Islamic Revolutionary Courts of Tehran, Mousa Ghazanfari Abadi, addressed the law, which carries a sentence of up to ten years in prison.
“Those who take a video of themselves or others pertaining to the removal of the hijab and send it, will be subject to Article 508 of the Islamic Penal Code … Additionally, not only any video of removing hijab, but any video that is sent to Ms. Alinejad about anything that is against the regime, the people, or the Islamic Republic of Iran, can also be subjected to that article,” Mr. Ghazanfari said in his speech, according to the English translation.
The jury also saw a front-page cartoon from a national Iranian newspaper, depicting two dissidents caught in a net, Jamshid Sharmahd, a U.S.-based German-Iranian software engineer, and the journalist Ruhollah Zam, an Iranian national and resident of France with refugee status. Both men were captured. Sharmahd was kidnapped in Dubai, and Zam is believed to have been arrested in Iraq. They were taken back to Iran, forced to give false confessions of their “guilt” on national television and then hanged. On the bottom of the cartoon, peeking through the gutter, was a caricature of Ms. Alinejad’s face, captioned, “Next: Masih Alinejad.”
When she spoke about the time the regime arrested her brother, who was sentenced to eight years in prison, thankfully only having to serve two, she held back tears on the witness stand.
Prosecutors also showed the jury a video in which Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Hosseini Khamenei, referred to Ms. Alinejad as “an American political agent.”
Prior to that, in a speech at the European Parliament, Ms. Alinejad had compared the hijab rule to the Berlin Wall.
“Compulsory hijab is like the Berlin Wall,” Ms. Alinejad said she had told European leaders. “Let’s bring this wall – together – down.”
The Ayatollah Khamenei referenced that comparison in a speech in October 2022, addressing the protests triggered by the death of a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, who had mysteriously died in a hospital in Tehran. The Guidance Patrol, the religious morality police, had arrested Ms. Amini for not wearing her hijab. Iranian law enforcement officials said she suffered a heart attack at a police station. But eyewitnesses, including women who were detained with her, said that she was severely and fatally beaten.
The protests, which had erupted in the streets of Tehran, the Ayatollah said, were not actually “about the girl… The argument is not about the hijabs … The real issue came to light when you see the American political agent compare these events to the Berlin Wall … You have to understand what the intention is. You must understand that it is not about the compassion for a girl.” He was, it appears, suggesting that Ms. Alinejad is trying to bring down his government.
In 2022, shortly before the FBI moved her out of her home after the failed assassination plot, Ms. Alinejad gave a speech in New York, where she called on people not to show “mercy for the Islamic Republic.” Afterwards, she testified, she was bombarded with threats, and “the threats were different, the level of threats was very bad.” She said she felt “broken a little bit.”
She took to social media, her weapon, and told her audience that for “every insult I get I plant a flower and that’s why I have a beautiful garden… Whenever they try to insult you, go and plant a flower.”
After Ms. Alinejad’s testimony, the prosecution called two more witnesses, both FBI agents, who interviewed the two defendants on the plane, after they had been arrested and were being extradited to New York.
One agent showed the jury an Iranian residence permit, verifying that Mr. Amirov had in fact resided in Iran, or had had the permission to stay there for one year starting in May 2022.
In an audio recording of the interview, Mr. Amirov could be heard telling the agent that he wasn’t working, that his family gave him money, and that he used to be involved with the “free wrestling” sports industry. His attorneys have not denied that he is a mobster, but they argued he did not plot to kill Ms. Alinejad.
Mr. Omarov, on the other hand, told the agent on the plane that he had been set up. People were trying to kill him, he said, because they didn’t want him to be a “vor,” the Russian term for leader in the criminal organization, also known as “vory v zakone” or “thief-in-law.”
The prosecution plans to rest its case on Wednesday morning.