Prosecutor says at trial that Iran put $500,000 bounty on head of Iranian-American journalist
The government of Iran put a $500,000 bounty on the head of an outspoken Iranian-American journalist to fund an assassination plot to silence her, a prosecutor told jurors Wednesday at the closing of a murder-for-hire trial.
The purported hitman was arrested in July 2022 before he could kill journalist Masih Alinejad, leading to a trial of two Russian mobsters who organized the murder plot, Assistant US Attorney Michael Lockard told a Manhattan federal jury.
Lockard spoke a day after Alinejad testified that she endured a barrage of threats after launching online campaigns from her Brooklyn home to inspire women in Iran to rebel against government edicts.
Alinejad left Iran for America in 2009 after the country's disputed presidential election, quickly building a social media following of millions of people worldwide.
She said she got deluged by videos sent to her by women in Iran after she challenged them to film themselves with their hair exposed when Iran's morality police were not around.
Her campaign, dubbed 'My Stealthy Freedom,' encouraged women to rebel against Iran's edict that their hair must always be covered in public with a hijab to conform to religious requirements.
Lockard said the government of Iran labeled the journalist as an enemy of the state and for years tried to harass, smear and intimidate Alinejad.
'When those efforts failed, the government of Iran put a $500,000 bounty on her head,' he said.
He said two high-level members of the Russian mob — Rafat Amirov and Polad Omarov — were paid by the government of Iran to organize a plot to kill Alinejad in 2022. The evidence, he added, was overwhelming.
The men, both natives of Azerbaijan, did not commit any of the multiple crimes they were charged with, their lawyers told the jury in closing arguments.
Attorney Michael Martin, representing Amirov, said there was no dispute that Iran was targeting Alinejad, but his client was not part of any plot.
He attacked the credibility of Khalid Mehdiyev, who testified last week that he was paid $30,000 to kill Alinejad, but his task was interrupted when police pulled him over for rolling through a stop sign. A loaded AK-47 was in his backseat.
Martin called Mehdiyev a 'manipulative, violent, lying person.'
Attorney Elena Fast, representing Omarov, said Mehdiyev was a 'clown as a hitman' who never intended to kill Alinejad.
'This was a plan to scam and not to murder,' she said, claiming that anyone communicating about a plot was merely trying to collect money offered for a killing with no intent to do anything in return.
After prosecutors deliver a rebuttal argument on Thursday, instructions on the law will be read to the jury, which will begin to deliberate afterward.
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Los Angeles Times
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During the protests, the administration has worked with new-media figures and online influencers to promote its political points. Phil McGraw, the TV personality known as Dr. Phil who now runs the conservative media network Merit Street, posted an exclusive interview with border czar Tom Homan and embedded with ICE officers last week during L.A. raids, as the company's spokesperson first told CNN. Some top administration officials have worked to frame the protests in militaristic terms, with White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller on Saturday sharing a video of the protest and calling it 'an insurrection against the laws and sovereignty of the United States.' Others, like Vice President JD Vance, have treated it as a chance for dark jokes. When posters on X said Vance could do the 'funniest thing ever' by deporting Derek Guy, a prominent menswear commentator who discussed how his family had been undocumented after fleeing Vietnam, the vice president on Monday posted a brief clip of Jack Nicholson nodding with a sinister grin. Some far-right influencers urged their followers to identify people caught on camera during the civil unrest. In one X post with more than 29,000 likes, the account End Wokeness shared a video of masked figures throwing rocks at police from an overpass and said, 'These are insurrectionists trying to kill cops. Make them famous.' In more left-leaning online spaces, some posters watching from the sidelines offered advice on how protesters could best position their cause to the rest of the world. On the r/ICE_raids subreddit, some posters urged L.A. protesters to stop carrying non-American flags. It's 'adding ammo to ICE's justification,' one poster said, attaching a screenshot of a Homeland Security post showing masked protesters with Mexican flags. Many accounts, knowingly or unknowingly, shared images that warped the reality of what was happening on the ground. An X account with 388,000 followers called US Homeland Security News, which is not affiliated with DHS but paid for one of X's 'verified' blue check marks, posted a photo of bricks that it said had been ordered to be 'used by Democrat militants against ICE agents and staff!! It's Civil War!!' The photo actually originated on the website of a Malaysian construction-supply company. The post has nevertheless been viewed more than 800,000 times. On Sunday night, California Gov. Gavin Newsom's X account tried to combat some of the misinformation directly, saying a viral video post being passed around as evidence of the day's chaos was actually five years old. Even before the L.A. protests, the increased attention on ICE activity had driven a rush of online organizing and real-world information gathering, with some people opposed to mass deportations tracking the movements of ICE officers with plans to foil or disrupt raids. In one viral TikTok post last week, a Minneapolis protester marching in a crowd outside the site of a rumored ICE raid said he had learned of it from Reddit, where a photo had been posted of Homeland Security Investigations officers outside a Mexican restaurant. The local sheriff's office later told news crews that the operation was not an immigration-enforcement case and that no arrests had been made. Some online creators treated the L.A. clashes as a prized opportunity for viral content. On Reddit, accounts with names like LiveNews_24H posted 'crazy footage' compilations of the unrest and said it looked like a 'war zone.' On YouTube, Damon Heller, who comments on police helicopter footage and scanner calls under the name Smoke N' Scan, streamed the clashes on Sunday for nearly 12 hours. Jeremy Lee Quinn, a photographer who shares protest footage to his social media followers, posted to Instagram on Saturday a video of protesters cheering from a bridge as officers tried to extinguish a burning police vehicle. Quinn, who also documented Black Lives Matter marches and the U.S. Capitol riots, said viewers on the left and right treat viral videos like weapons in their arsenal. Far-left viewers might take away from the videos ideas for militant tactics to use in future protests, he said, while far-right viewers will promote the videos to suggest the other side craves more violent crime. Either way, his material gets seen - including through reposts by groups such as the LibsOfReddit subreddit, which shares screenshots mocking liberal views on undocumented immigrants and transgender people. 'You end up with a far-right ecosystem that thrives on these viral moments,' Quinn said. As short-form video and social media platforms increasingly become many Americans' news sources of choice, experts worry they could also amp up the fear and outrage engendered by polarizing events. The fragmentation of social media and the attention-chasing machinery of its recommendation algorithms helps ensure that 'there are a lot of people talking past each other,' said Northeastern's Edelson, not seeing one another's content or 'even aware of the facts that are relevant to the other side.' Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, said videos can play a uniquely forceful role in shaping people's reactions to current events because they 'encapsulate the emotion of the moment.' 'There's a heavy dose of misinformation,' he added. 'And, you know, people just end up getting angrier and angrier.' 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