By Jack Queen
(Reuters) -Two men convicted of murder-for-hire charges were each sentenced in New York on Wednesday to 25 years in prison over what prosecutors called a failed Tehran-backed plot to kill an Iranian dissident living in the U.S.
Rafat Amirov, 46, and Polad Omarov, 41, appeared in prison garb before U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon in Manhattan.
A jury found them guilty in March of five charges – including attempted murder, money laundering and conspiracy – for their roles in a 2022 plot to assassinate Masih Alinejad, a U.S.-Iranian and an outspoken critic of Tehran and its treatment of women.
“This was a terrible, terrible crime that has had terrible, terrible repercussions on some very fine people,” McMahon said.
Alinejad addressed the court with a crowd of supporters seated behind her, saying Amirov and Omarov had turned her life upside down but failed to break her.
“I crossed an ocean to come to America and have a normal life, and I don’t have a normal life,” Alinejad said, drawing applause as she left the podium.
The sentences came in below the 55 years for each man sought by prosecutors and above the 10 to 13 years recommended by the defense.
Lawyers for Amirov and Omarov urged for leniency, seeking to downplay their clients’ ties to Tehran and roles in the plot. They did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment on Wednesday.
Prosecutors said Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard Corps paid Amirov and Omarov $500,000 for the botched hit on Alinejad, who fled Iran in 2009.
Iran has dismissed as baseless allegations that its intelligence officers sought to kidnap or kill Alinejad.
The case was part of a crackdown by the Justice Department on what it calls transnational repression: the targeting by authoritarian governments of political opponents on foreign soil.
Alinejad is 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. She was living in Brooklyn at the time of the alleged plot on her life.
A third man, Khalid Mehdiyev, was charged alongside Amirov and Omarov and pleaded guilty to attempted murder and illegal possession of a firearm.
The self-proclaimed Russian mob associate testified against Amirov and Omarov at their trial and told jurors he tried to kill Alinejad in coordination with the two men.
Mehdiyev was arrested in 2022 after staking out Alinejad’s home with an AK-47 and a ski mask in his car. He is awaiting sentencing.
(Reporting by Jack Queen in New YorkEditing by Frances Kerry and Nia Williams)
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