The two men accused 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 in the summer of 2022 were found guilty on all five counts at a federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan on Thursday.
“The jury has reached a verdict,” the presiding district judge, Colleen McMahon, announced at 4:30pm in the afternoon. The note came as a surprise. Earlier, the jury had requested to see the testimony of a key witness, Khalid Mehdiyev, and the attorneys were still going through the transcript, and had not yet sent the hard copy to the jury room, when the note came in that the verdict was ready. It appeared that the issue regarding the controversial witness had been resolved without the requested documentation.
The two Azerbaijani defendants, Rafat Amirov, 46, and Polad Omarov, 40, were arrested overseas in January 2023 and extradited to New York. They were charged with contracting with the Iranian regime to orchestrate the murder of Ms. Alinejad outside of her Brooklyn home in. On Thursday, they were found guilty on all five counts: 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.
“They couldn’t care less,” Assistant United States Attorney Matthew Hellman told the jury in the morning, when he gave his rebuttal statement, referring to Mr. Amirov and Mr. Omarov, who are both admitted high ranking members of the Russian mob. “It doesn’t matter who she was and what she had to offer to the world.” Mr. Hellman was referring to the defendants’ targeted victim Ms. Alinejad.
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