Two Russian mobsters were each sentenced to 25 years in jail on Wednesday for hiring a hitman to kill Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejad at her US home three years ago for the Iranian government.
“I crossed an ocean to come to America and have a normal life and I don’t have a normal life,” Ms Alinejad said just before Judge Colleen McMahon announced the sentences in Manhattan federal court for Rafat Amirov, 46, and Polad Omarov, 41.
“I’m a brave woman. I’m a strong woman. They couldn’t break me. But they brought fear to my life. These criminals turned my life upside down,” Ms Alinejad said as she spoke at a lectern near the men, who sat in prison uniforms with their hands folded in front of them. She urged the judge to send a message “to the regime and the women of Iran".
Ms McMahon said the men had committed a “terrible, terrible crime” and that she hoped her sentence would alert foreign gangs and powers “that this kind of conduct will not be tolerated by the United States".
Outside the court afterwards, Ms Alinejad appeared with Barry Rosen, one of more than 50 Americans who were seized in Iran in 1979 and held hostage for more than 14 months.
“Justice is beautiful,” she said as she held a sunflower someone had given her. She said Mr Rosen, who had a gun held to his head when he was a hostage, “is here to stand by my side to see justice".
Mr Rosen called Ms Alinejad “one of the most important people in the world” for her efforts to give voice to the voiceless in Iran and elsewhere around the globe.
At the sentencing proceeding, assistant US attorney Michael Lockard had urged Ms McMahon to send the convicted men away for 55 years. He said Iranian leaders had hoped to silence a woman who has a bigger social media following than the supreme leader of Iran.
Mr Lockard said the intended target of the assassination plot was not just Ms Alinejad, “but those millions of people who look to Masih Alinejad to be their voice, to promote their cause and to shine a light on the corrupt and deadly tactics of the government of Iran".
Prosecutors said Amirov, of Iran, and Omarov, of Georgia, were crime bosses in the Russian mob, motivated by $500,000 offered for the death of Ms Alinejad.
Before he was sentenced, Amirov urged the judge not to “take into account only my associations” and to understand that the descriptions of violence associated with the mob “is not who we are”. His lawyers requested he serve no more than 13 years in prison.
Omarov declined to speak. His lawyer, Elena Fast, said her client should not be imprisoned for more than 10 years.
The men were convicted in a two-week March trial that featured dramatic testimony from a hired gunman and Ms Alinejad, an author, activist and contributor to Voice of America.
Prosecutors said the men were high-ranking members of the Gulici, a faction of the Russian Mob that carried out murders, assaults, extortions, kidnappings, robberies and arson in the US and abroad.
Ms Alinejad, 49, has led online campaigns encouraging women in Iran to record videos of themselves exposing their hair to protest against compulsory head coverings in public.
Prosecutors said Iranian intelligence officials first plotted in 2020 and 2021 to kidnap her in the US and move her to Iran to silence her criticism.
