US prosecutors have charged three men with attempting to assassinate a prominent critic of Iran’s government who was previously the target of a failed Tehran-backed kidnapping plot, Attorney-General Merrick Garland says.
Rafat Amirov, Polad Omarov and Khalid Mehdiyev were charged with murder-for-hire and money laundering for their role in the thwarted Tehran-backed assassination attempt of the journalist and activist, who is a US citizen and lives in Brooklyn.
Garland did not name the alleged victim, but Mehdiyev was arrested last year in New York for having a rifle outside the Brooklyn home of journalist Masih Alinejad, a longtime critic of Iran’s head-covering laws who has promoted videos of women violating those laws to her millions of social media followers.
In an interview with Reuters, Alinejad said she was invited to the FBI headquarters in Manhattan this morning where a dozen agents described to her the details of the plot.
In July, the men had planned to get Alinejad out of her house by asking her for flowers from her garden, and then gun her down, authorities said.
Her elaborate garden is well known in the neighbourhood, with each section dedicated to family in Iran from who she has been separated for 13 years. The assailants had been monitoring the property and may have observed that she often shares flowers with her neighbours, she said.
Read the article by Luc Cohen and Joel Schectman in The Canberra Times.