Iranian journalist and murder-for-hire goal Masih Alinejad described in court docket Tuesday the second she noticed her bungling would-be killer staring straight into her eyes by way of her pristine sunflower patch — however figured the “gigantic” hitman was simply admiring her backyard.
The spine-tingling run-in occurred July 28, 2022 — which is identical day amateurish murderer Khalid Mehdiyev bought picked up by the native cops in Brooklyn with a ski masks and a loaded AK-47 in his automobile proper close to Alinejad’s Flatbush dwelling.
A self-described ladies’s rights activist who’s been focused by the Iranian regime a number of occasions since fleeing the nation in 2009, Alinejad instructed a jury in Manhattan federal court docket that she’d simply gotten dwelling from a visit to San Francisco that day when she seen “the big guy” gawking at her.
“I was with a friend, and I went to my backyard garden to prepare for [another] trip to Connecticut,” she mentioned. “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.”
When requested to explain the self-professed Russian mobster, she referred to as him “gigantic” — however mentioned he appeared like simply one other wandering Brooklynite on the time.
“He had a phone in his hand … I saw he was talking,” she mentioned, including that she mistook his telephone dialog for an try to speak to her.
However one thing in regards to the leering 27-year-old struck her unsuitable. And after going inside, she raced to her entrance door to retrieve a key she’d forgotten.
That’s when she noticed him.
“He was like, in the sunflowers, staring into my eyes,” Alinejad mentioned. “Then I got really panicked, but I didn’t know anything.”
Ultimately, she thought he was most likely simply taking footage of “my beautiful sunflowers,” as others who stroll by way of the neighborhood are likely to.
However she ought to have trusted her instinct.
Mehdiyev, a pizza place employee who doubled as a mob henchman, was allegedly there to kill her that day on orders from Rafat Amirov and Polad Omarov, Azerbaijan nationals who are accused of hiring Mehdiyev to clip the exiled journalist.
The prison pair have pleaded not responsible to the fees, which may imprison them for many years in the event that they’re convicted.
Brokers of the Iranian authorities have been looking Alinejad relentlessly since she fled the Center Jap nation in 2009, however their barbarous schemes have to date fallen brief.
Omarov and Amirov at the moment are on trial for murder-for-hire and tried homicide in help of racketeering for the plot — and authorities have mentioned they and Mehdiyev had been a part of the identical gang of their shared dwelling nation.
However the plan — for which the Iranians paid the pair about $500,000 — went ridiculously awry when Mehdiyev tipped his hand by making an attempt to open her door, ordering meals to his automobile as he lurked outdoors after which working a cease signal because the cops trailed him.
Police arrested him in his Subaru Forester SUV with Illinois plates simply outdoors Alinejad’s home, and located the loaded assault rifle with one within the chamber and the ski masks — which Mehdiyev plainly mentioned in court docket he deliberate to make use of to kill the dissident.
Mehdiyev — who mentioned he was paid $30,000 for the botched hit — determined to cooperate with the feds after pleading responsible to tried homicide and gun costs that might earn him at the very least 15 years within the clink.
It wasn’t the primary time Alinejad has been focused in America — a 12 months earlier than the aborted hit, an Iranian intelligence official and three others had been indicted on costs that they had plotted to kidnap Alinejad.
However she has mentioned the Iranian authorities’s repeated makes an attempt to kill her — which the nation has denied — have made her “more determined to give voice to powerful women inside Iran who are facing the same killers every single day.”
