The two men convicted of having been hired by people tied to the Iranian government to assassinate the Iranian-American journalist and human rights activist Masih Alinejad in New York City were sentenced at a federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan on Wednesday. 

The presiding district judge, Colleen McMahon, sentenced Rafat Amirov and Polad Omarov to 25 years in prison each, telling the defendants that they had committed a “terrible, terrible crime with terrible, terrible repercussions on some very fine people.” 

In March, after a two-week long trial at the Southern District of New York, the two men, who were high-ranking members of the Gulici, a faction of the Russian Mob, were convicted of having accepted a $500,000 bounty from the Iranian regime to orchestrate the murder of Ms. Alinejad outside of her home in Brooklyn. 

Neither convict is an American citizen. Amirov, 46, who was born in Iran, but grew up in the Soviet Union, and Omarov, 40, who was born in Georgia, were arrested overseas in January 2023 and extradited to New York, where they were charged with murder-for-hire, conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire, money laundering, attempted murder in the aid of racketeering, and firearm use in relation to attempted murder. The jury took under four hours to find the two defendants guilty on all five counts.  

Ms. Alinejad, 49, a longtime resident of Brooklyn, has been a fierce critic of the Iranian regime for decades. She has worked as a contractor for Voice of America’s Farsi-language network since 2015. She fled Iran, where she was born and raised in 2009 and became an American citizen in 2019. She has survived several assassination attempts. 

“I crossed an ocean to America to have a normal life, and I don’t have a normal life,” Ms. Alinejad told the judge during her impact statement in a courtroom packed with friends and supporters. “When I came here, my dream was to jump on a bicycle and just bike freely, and now, I cannot do that because of these criminals.”

On July 28, 2022, detectives for the New York Police Department stopped a man near Ms. Alinejad’s Brooklyn house after he sped through a stop sign. Officers found a rifle, fully loaded, on his backseat inside a suitcase, along with ammunition, a black ski mask and rubber gloves.

That man was Khalid Mehdiyev, who was 27 years old at the time, and had  been hired by Amirov and Omarov to “kill the journalist” as he testified during the trial in March. Mr. Mehdiyev is originally from Azerbaijan and belonged to the same crime syndicate as two defendants, which he referred to in his testimony as “the Russian mob.” 

He came to the United States in 2017 on a tourist visa and later applied for political asylum, falsely stating that he was being persecuted in his home country Azerbaijan. He proceeded to lead a life of organized crime, engaging in robberies, extortion, kidnappings, arson, attempted check frauds and contract killings, he told the jury, until he was hired by Omarov to carry out the murder of Ms. Alinejad. 

After the failed assaination, the hitman pleaded guilty to numerous federal charges, including attempted murder and possession of an illegal firearm. He also pleaded guilty to charges unrelated to Ms. Alinejad’s assasination attempt in the Eastern District of New York. Mr. Mehdiyev has not been sentenced yet. 

Prosecutors said that the order to kill Ms. Alinejad came from a network of Iranians who have been charged by American prosecutors but are not in American custody, after their efforts to intimidate the outspoken journalist failed. She “dedicated her life to exposing the cruelty, corruption, and tyranny of the Islamic Republic,” prosecutors wrote in court filings. 

According to the evidence presented at trial, the Iranians offered to pay Amirov and Omarov a total sum of $500,000 for Ms. Alinejad’s murder. In court filings, prosecutors wrote that when the two mobsters were offered the bounty, they “appeared completely incurious about who they were plotting to murder and why… Amirov and Omarov were interested in one thing only: their own power and wealth.” They asked the judge to punish each of the defendants with a 55 year prison sentence.  

Defense attorneys for Amirov argued in their sentencing submission that no one was actually killed nor physically hurt and that their client’s involvement in the plot was “minimal, if not non-existent.” 

During the sentencing hearing on Wednesday, Amirov’s attorney, Michael Martin, said that his client was respected by the correction officers and other inmates at Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where he has been incarcerated for 33 months. “One of the guards told me,” the attorney said that Amirov is “one of the good ones… One that keeps things calm.”   

His defense team asked for a 13 year prison sentence. His co-defendant’s attorney called for a 10 year sentence. The defense attorney, Elena Fast, asked the judge not to drag these crimes into “geopolitics” and not to punish her client for “Iran’s repeated attacks on Ms. Alinejad’s life.”

But Ms. Alinejad’s husband, the Iranian-American journalist Kambiz Foroohar, who also addressed the court, said that he was “struck (on) how casually these men discussed the murder” of his wife.

Mr. Foroohar also shared that after the assassination attempt, he and his wife had to sell their Brooklyn home, that he was not able to see his two children for many months, and that his work suffered. Ms. Alinejad said that they have had to move 21 times since the assassination plot was discovered. 

“I am the survivor of this assassination plot, and even in this room today I felt the humiliation of my life being treated as a business transaction,” Ms. Alinejad told the court. “These guys, they barely know who I am.” 

Outside the courthouse, she was asked how it felt to face two men who tried to kill her. 

“I was nervous at the same time and very empowered to speak the truth.” Ms. Alinejad said. Next to her, supporting her, stood Barry Rosen, who was the former press attache at the American embassy in Iran in 1979, and who became one of 52 Americans held under brutal conditions for 444 days by militants and Iran’s then Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. 

“I feel that anybody who’s been hurt by Iran is a friend of mine.” Mr. Rosen told the Sun. “They are going to jail for 300 months and they deserve it. And the regime in Iran deserves hell on earth right now.” He added. “Today justice was had.” 

“Women like freedom,” Ms. Alinejad told reporters. “The Islamic Republic is the biggest enemy of joy.” Before she left, she sang an Iranian song. 

She translated the lyrics from Farsi into English. “It means,” she said. “I will blossom through my wounds because I am a woman, I am a woman, I am a woman.”