The hitman who says he was hired to assassinate the journalist and Iranian dissident Masih Alinejad in New York City, testified in federal court, how he surveilled her home in Brooklyn for several days, waiting in vain for her to come outside so he could kill her. As he testified, Ms. Alinejad’s husband was sitting inside the courtroom.
“It’s an out of body experience that someone is describing how they’re going to do harm in such a cold way. It gets worse as more disturbing details are coming out,” Ms. Alinejad’s husband, Kambiz Foroohar, told the Sun on Wednesday during the lunch break.
Mr. Foroohar, a former journalist who spent many years in senior editorial roles at Bloomberg News, is married to Ms. Alinejad, an Iranian born American citizen. He had been listening to the testimony of the self-described mobster, Khalid Mehdiyev, who gave chilling details about his attempt to kill his wife at their shared home in Brooklyn in July 2022 before he was arrested by law enforcement after speeding through a stop sign. Ms. Alinejad herself was not in the courtroom.
As Assistant U.S. Attorney Jacob Gutwillig questioned the Mr. Mehdiyev he showed the jury numerous photographs the hitman had on his phone of Mr. Foroohar and Ms. Alinejad hugging each other, laughing together. and even pictures of Ms. Alinejad’s son. The hitman described how he was parked outside of the house for days, a loaded rifle in his car, waiting for her to come outside and water the flowers in her small front yard so he could shoot her.
At first he had tried to find someone else “to kill the journalist” because he “wasn’t trying to get his hands dirty,” and he was also busy, working on an extortion job in Brooklyn. But “after I didn’t find anyone to kill the journalist, I decided to do it myself,” Mr. Mehdiyev testified.
“Make sure she’s dead. Put one bullet in her head,” a text message read that was shown to the jury. It had been sent to him, the witness said, by another mobster, Polar Omarov.
Mr. Omarov, 40, is one of the two defendants on trial accused of having been hired by people with ties to the Iranian government to assassinate Ms. Alinejad in New York. The other defendant is 54-year old Rafat Amirov. Both men are natives of Azerbaijan, a country that borders Iran and Russia, and they are not American citizens. Federal prosecutors intend to prove that Mr. Omarov and Mr. Amirov contracted Mr. Mehdiyev to carry out the actual murder.
“The defendants were hired guns for the government of Iran,” Mr. Gutwillig said in his opening statement on Tuesday. “Masih Alinejad was almost gunned down on the streets of New York City by a hitman sent by the defendants.”
The Iranian government has denied any involvement in any attempt to take
Ms. Alinejad’s life. The two defendants have pleaded not guilty to the charges, which include murder-for-hire, conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire, money laundering conspiracy, and possession of a firearm. Both men were arrested overseas in January 2023 and brought to New York to face trial. Other defendants, who are also listed in the indictment, have not been arrested yet and remain on the loose, likely overseas.
Meanwhile, Mr. Mehdiyev has pleaded guilty and is cooperating with the government in hope for a lower sentence. He is a key witness in the trial currently underway at the Southern District of New York.
Ms. Alinejad, 48, did not attend the proceeding because she is a witness in the trial. “As a witness I am not allowed in the courtroom so I am sitting outside, reliving the moment when that man stood with a loaded gun in front of my home,” Ms. Alinejad wrote on X on Tuesday.
“My heart is racing,” she went on. “I am overwhelmed with mixed emotions. I love my life, and I don’t want to die – but I am willing to sacrifice it for millions of women and men in Iran who long for the same freedom that many in America take for granted.”
Ms. Alinejad, who authored the best-selling memoir “The Wind In My Hair” and has worked as a contractor for Voice of America’s Farsi-language network since 2015, has been a fierce critic of the Iranian regime for decades. She survived several assassination attempts and fled Iran, where she was born and raised in 2009. She became an American citizen in 2019.
“I love America, and I don’t want to see assassins sent by the Islamic Republic walking freely in my new homeland. You might find this hard to believe – but simply for posting videos of myself showing my hair and encouraging women in Iran to do the same, the regime sent a man with an AK-47 to my house in Brooklyn to kill me,” Ms. Alinejad wrote on X.
The hired assassin, Mr. Mehdiyev, testified that he sent text messages to her phone saying endearments such as, “Hi, how are you? I am your follower from instagram u the best journalist.” One such message read that was shown to the jury on Wednesday. In another message, he wrote, “Hey. How are you. I wanna make immigrants paper, do u can help for that?”
Mr. Mehdiyev, 27, has been living in the United States since 2017. He is originally from Azerbaijan like the two defendants and belongs to the same crime organization as they do, which he referred to in his testimony as “the Russian mob.” He told the jury that he didn’t actually need any help with any immigration papers, he was just “trying to have a conversation with her so I could get into her life.” He added, “I was trying to get the easy way to kill her.”
The jury watched a video that Mr. Mehdiyev filmed of himself walking through Ms. Alinejad’s front yard, showing his hands lightly touching the flowers she had planted there as he walked up her porch.
Ms. Alinejad’s brother in law, who attended the court hearing with her husband but he did not want to be named, told the Sun that the flowers in her front yard were so fetching that “people walking by would stop and look at the garden.”
Mr. Mehdiyev testified he was pretending to be someone who was interested in the flowers to lure her out of her house and shoot her. But the attempt failed after detectives for the New York Police Department, who had been alerted to suspicious activity, arrested him.
“Isn’t it a rule that you are not supposed to kill someone unless that person has harmed you?” Defense attorney Michael W. Martin asked this question as he began his cross-examination of the witness in the afternoon. He was referring to the rules that criminals of the organization Mr. Mehdiyev belongs to abide by.
“None of the cases,” Mr. Martin asked, referring to the numerous other criminal cases that had been mentioned during Mr. Mehdiyev’s testimony, “involved a woman. Because a woman is not typically able to harm you?”
“That is correct, sir,” Mr. Mehdiyev replied.
Mr. Martin is defending Mr. Amirov. Each defendant has his own defense team, and each team will cross-examine witnesses, trying to prove that their clients were not involved in the plot.
During his opening statement on Tuesday, Mr. Martin told the jury that Mr. Amirov “was dragged into this case,” that “others plotted against him,” and that the evidence would fail to show “that he is part of this conspiracy.” He argued that the evidence against Mr. Mehdiyev “is overwhelming,” and indicated that he planned to blame the government’s witness for the assassination plot.
Mr. Mehdiyev’s cross-examination will continue on Thursday.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
