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Prosecutors said that Rafit Amirov and Polad Omarov were working for an Iranian general when they stalked Masih Alinejad in Brooklyn. She has sought women’s rights in the theocracy for years.
Oct. 29, 2025, 2:56 p.m. ET
Masih Alinejad, an expatriate activist and a critic of Iran, stood in a Manhattan courtroom on Wednesday, a few feet from two men who had plotted to kill her.
“They couldn’t break me,” she said of the men, Rafit Amirov and Polad Omarov, who prosecutors said were members of the Russian mob working on behalf of an Iranian general.
Moments later, Judge Colleen McMahon of Federal District Court in Manhattan sentenced the two to 25 years in prison, adding her own blistering critique to the defiance expressed by Ms. Alinejad.
“The intended murder was a politically motivated assassination attempt,” Judge McMahon said, adding: “This sort of conduct will not be tolerated by the United States.”
Federal prosecutors had asked that each man be sentenced to 55 years in prison, writing to the court that the defendants had “sought to soak the Brooklyn streets with the victim’s blood.”
Iran’s plan was to “silence one of the regime’s most vocal, internationally recognized, and effective critics,” prosecutors added, and “drive the cold blade of fear into the hearts of its adversaries.”
United States officials say figures in Iran have been tied to several attempts to kidnap or kill Ms. Alinejad, who worked as a journalist covering the Iranian parliament and then became an activist, protesting laws that made hijabs compulsory for women.
Twelve days before Wednesday’s sentencing, a New York City man named Carlisle Rivera pleaded guilty to conspiring to stalk and kill Ms. Alinejad, part of a plot said to have been generated in Iran after Mr. Amirov and Mr. Omarov’s scheme was thwarted. Another defendant in that case, Jonathan Loadholt, is in custody and facing charges. A third, Farhad Shakeri, is believed to be in Iran.
While calling herself “strong” during her statement to the court on Wednesday, Ms. Alinejad acknowledged that Mr. Amirov and Mr. Omarov had “brought fear into my life,” adding: “I have to watch over my shoulder.”
Before being sentenced, Mr. Omarov declined to speak. Mr. Amirov, through a translator, said: “I always try to avert conflict and bring people to common ground.”
The conspiracy to kill Ms. Alinejad began in 2022. A network run by Ruhollah Bazghandi, an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps brigadier general, contacted Mr. Amirov, a citizen of Azerbaijan and Russia who was living in Iran, prosecutors said. They added that Mr. Amirov turned to Mr. Omarov, a Georgian living in Eastern Europe, to carry out the plot.
Mr. Omarov’s handpicked assassin, an Azerbaijani man named Khalid Mehdiyev, who was living in Yonkers, N.Y., stalked Ms. Alinejad for about a week. At one point he stepped onto her porch in Brooklyn and, prosecutors said, tried to open her front door. He was stopped by police minutes later, after running a red light in a Subaru S.U.V. When Mr. Mehdiyev gave officers an expired license, they arrested him, searched his car and found an AK-47-style assault rifle.
Mr. Mehdiyev became a government witness, testifying over several days about the plot and his life within a Russian criminal group called Thieves-in-Law. Mr. Omarov had sent him to kill Ms. Alinejad, Mr. Mehdiyev said. He also testified that Mr. Amirov later spoke with him while they were both in federal custody and admitted that he had been part of the plot.
He said that he had glimpsed Ms. Alinejad one day while walking past her home. By the time he returned to a parked vehicle to get his rifle, she was gone. Ms. Alinejad testified about seeing an imposing man in her garden and “staring into my eyes.” Soon after that, the F.B.I. brought her to a safe house.
In filings to Judge McMahon, lawyers for Mr. Amirov and Mr. Omarov argued for lenience, writing that their clients had been thousands of miles from Brooklyn when Mr. Mehdiyev showed up there, that he did not remove the rifle from his car and that, ultimately, nobody was harmed.
Mr. Omarov’s lawyers asked Judge McMahon to sentence him to no more than 10 years in prison, saying that he had no contact with the Iranian government.
Lawyers for Mr. Amirov wrote to the court that he deserved a sentence of no more than 13 years, saying that he had been “merely a pawn” for the government in Iran. Several Iranian figures charged in the scheme to target Ms. Alinejad remain at large.
“Other, more blameworthy parties used him to shield themselves and have not been brought to justice,” Mr. Amirov’s lawyers wrote.
Prosecutors countered that Mr. Amirov and Mr. Omarov were placing too much weight upon the fact that their willingness to kill was spurred by the promise of a $500,000 payment rather than by ideological hostility.
“The Iranian regime’s motives for targeting Ms. Alinejad are particularly reprehensible and despicable,” those lawyers wrote. “But Amirov and Omarov’s callous uncaring is hardly mitigating.”
