‘Fairly unexceptional' US lady hired as hitwoman is convicted in attempted UK slay
Aimee Betro, 45, of West Allis, WI, was part of a slay plot targeting Sikander Ali outside his home in Birmingham, England, on Sept. 7, 2019, UK authorities said.
The planned hit was triggered by a fight at a Birmingham clothing boutique owned by Ali's father, Aslat Mahumad, in July 2018 which left two men — Mohammed Aslam, 56, and his son Mohammed Nabil Nazir, 31 — injured, a jury was told.
Betro had previously met Nazir on a dating app.
'[Betro was] a fairly unexceptional individual. On the face of it, a normal-looking individual, prepared to do an outrageous, audacious and persistent murder,' said Detective Chief Inspector Alastair Orencas from West Midlands Police's major crime unit to BBC News.
4 'Fairly unexceptional' Aimee Betro of Wisconsin has been found guilty of trying to shoot a UK storeowner.
Dramatic security footage from the shooting scene showed Betro, who had almost no previous 'criminal footprint,' approaching Ali's car and firing her gun at him at point-blank range, prosecutors said. Betro allegedly hid her identity at the time using a headscarf.
But her gun jammed, allowing Ali to flee, prosecutors said.
Betro later allegedly goaded Ali's father Mahumad by text.
'Where are you hiding?' she texted the dad. 'Stop playing hide and seek, you are lucky it jammed.'
4 Betro was extradited from Armenia to face a British court in January.
Hours later, Betro took a taxi to Ali's home and fired three gunshots at the property, which was empty at the time, before flying home to the US the next day.
Betro had allegedly traveled to the UK on two previous occasions after meeting Nazir on an app.
4 Betro was hired by Mohammed Nazir and his father to kill a man in Birmingham, England.
West Midlands Police/SWNS
Calling her crimes 'brazen,' Orencas said there didn't 'seem to be a whole lot of effort to avoid detection.'
In October 2019, just weeks after the bizarre failed murder bid, Betro took part in another of Nazir's revenge plots on a rival, authorities said.
She mailed three parcels of ammunition and gun parts to the UK, addressed to a man in the central English city of Derby, with the plan being that Nazir would tip off police and frame him for the crime, they said.
4 Nazir's father, Mohammed Aslam, was sentenced over the plot, too.
West Midlands Police/SWNS
The innocent man was arrested but later released without charge after Nazir's 'devious scheme' came to light, prosecutors said.
Betro's DNA was found on the gun parts and ammo inside the box, and she was seen in security footage at a post office 100 miles from her home sending the parcels under a fake name, the jury was told.
She tried to claim that the woman in the footage wasn't her, but just someone who dressed, looked and sounded like her.
Nazir and Aslam were jailed for 32 years and 10 years respectively in November for their role in the planned hit, while Betro was extradited from Armenia, where she was living, in January to face trial in the UK.
Wearing a purple t-shirt and with her hair in space buns, Betro appeared emotionless as she was convicted Tuesday of conspiracy to murder, possessing a self-loading pistol with intent to cause fear of violence, and illegally importing ammunition.
She was remanded in custody and is due to be sentenced Aug. 21.
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Yahoo
5 hours ago
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UK councillor acquitted over 'cut all their throats' speech
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Vox
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The government may still rely on these four factors to determine whom to stop or detain, however, so long as it has other reasons for targeting a particular individual. Thus, for example, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) could target someone because that person speaks Spanish, and they work as a day laborer, and they were witnessed getting into a truck owned by a company known for hiring undocumented immigrants, because one of the three factors that ICE considered in this hypothetical stop is not on Frimpong's list. That said, at least according to the Cato Institute's David Bier, Frimpong's order has drastically reduced the number of immigration arrests within Los Angeles. The central issue in this case, known as Noem v. Perdomo, is what courts are practically able to do in order to rein in overzealous tactics by law enforcement. Judge Frimpong's order is modest — again, it does not prevent the Trump administration from targeting anyone, just as long as part of the reason why a particular individual is targeted doesn't appear on Frimpong's list of four — but it is also unlikely to survive contact with a Republican Supreme Court that is extraordinarily solicitous toward Donald Trump. Indeed, the Court has long cautioned lower court judges against issuing broad orders imposing across-the-board restrictions on law enforcement. One of the seminal cases that the Trump administration relied upon in its Perdomo brief was handed down in 1983, well before the Court's recent partisan turn. The Republican justices, in other words, likely will not even need to stretch the law very far if they want to rule in Trump's favor in Perdomo. What is ICE up to in Los Angeles? The Perdomo case arises out of multiple immigration raids in Los Angeles, which have often taken place at job sites and other locations where the Trump administration believes that undocumented immigrants are often present. As Frimpong found, 'car wash workers, farm and agricultural workers, street vendors, recycling center workers, tow yard workers, and packing house workers were targeted.' One early operation 'detained multiple day laborers outside of the Westlake Home Depot.' At least some of these operations appear to violate the Constitution. In some instances, law enforcement appears to have targeted people because of their race. Frimpong, for example, pointed to an incident where 'agents approached and prevented a nonwhite individual from walking away but not those who appeared to be Caucasians.' A Latino car wash worker targeted by one of the raids testified that the federal agents who arrested him ignored two of his light-skinned coworkers, one of whom is Russian and another who is Persian. In other cases, federal agents appear to have targeted individuals despite having no reasonable grounds to believe they are undocumented. Plaintiff Jason Brian Gavidia, for example, is an American who was born in Los Angeles. According to an appeals court that upheld nearly all of Frimpong's order, agents 'forcefully pushed [Gavidia] up against the metal gated fence, put [his] hands behind [his] back, and twisted [his] arm' after he was unable to identify which hospital he was born in. The agents eventually released Gavidia after he produced a Real ID card, a document that is only issued to people who are legally present in the United States, but they took his ID. It is quite difficult to obtain a federal injunction against law enforcement officials It is likely, in other words, that at least some of the people targeted by these Los Angeles raids could individually challenge their arrests or detention in court. But the ability to bring such individual challenges often isn't worth very much. For starters, the Republican justices' decisions in Hernández v. Mesa (2020) and Egbert v. Boule (2022) likely make it impossible to collect money damages from an ICE agent who violates your constitutional rights. In Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents (1971), the Supreme Court held that federal law enforcement officers who violate someone's constitutional rights may be personally liable for that violation. But Hernández and Egbert read that decision so narrowly that such suits rarely, if ever, move forward. So, even if someone like Gavidia brings a successful lawsuit, he probably wouldn't win anything more than the right to get his ID back. Someone who is unlawfully detained could potentially obtain a court order demanding their release. But many people targeted by law enforcement lack access to legal counsel or cannot afford to hire a lawyer even if they can find one who will take their case. While indigent criminal defendants have a right to a government-paid lawyer, defendants in immigration proceedings typically do not. And even when immigration defendants do prevail, an occasional court decision declaring some long-past arrest illegal is unlikely to deter future illegal arrests. Yet, the Supreme Court has long discouraged federal judges from issuing injunctions that forbid law enforcement from acting illegally in the future. The key case is City of Los Angeles v. Lyons (1983), which held that Adolph Lyons, a man who was allegedly choked out by police officers without provocation, could not obtain a court order forbidding LA's police from using such chokeholds in the future. 'Past exposure to illegal conduct,' Justice Byron White wrote for the Court in Lyons, does not permit someone to seek an injunction. Rather, 'Lyons' standing to seek the injunction requested depended on whether he was likely to suffer future injury from the use of the chokeholds by police officers.' Indeed, White's decision placed nearly impossible barriers before most plaintiffs seeking court orders requiring police to modify their behavior. To obtain such an injunction, White wrote, Lyons 'would have had not only to allege that he would have another encounter with the police, but also to make the incredible assertion either (1) that all police officers in Los Angeles always choke any citizen with whom they happen to have an encounter, whether for the purpose of arrest, issuing a citation, or for questioning, or (2) that the City ordered or authorized police officers to act in such manner.' 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CASA (2025), which held that federal courts typically should not issue injunctions that extend beyond the individual parties to a lawsuit. So, even if the one plaintiff who was stopped twice may obtain an injunction, that court order might have to be so narrow that it protects him and him alone against future illegal stops. Trump's CASA argument is hardly airtight. Though CASA did hold that broad injunctions are generally discouraged, it did permit them when necessary to give a victorious plaintiff 'complete relief.' Frimpong argued that a broad injunction is warranted in Perdomo, because law enforcement officers cannot reasonably be expected to know which suspects are protected by a court order. 'It would be a fantasy to expect that law enforcement could and would inquire whether a given individual was among the [plaintiffs] before proceeding with a seizure,' she wrote. The only way to stop ICE from targeting the Perdomo plaintiffs is to issue a court order that protects everyone in Los Angeles. Will that argument persuade a majority of the justices? The honest answer is, 'Who knows?' CASA is a brand new decision, handed down less than two months ago, and the Court has yet to apply its new rule to the facts of any specific case — including the CASA case itself. And the fact remains that it is exceedingly difficult to obtain any injunction against law enforcement, much less the broadly applicable one handed down by Judge Frimpong. The Supreme Court has generally preferred for judges to adjudicate alleged legal violations by law enforcement one at a time, rather than issuing wholesale injunctions halting an illegal practice — even though individual decisions often do little to stop these practices. At least some parts of Frimpong's order are probably overly broad In fairness, there are some good reasons to prefer individual lawsuits over wholesale court orders. Fourth Amendment search and seizure cases typically turn on the very specific facts of a particular case. Police might reasonably suspect, for example, that a person spotted with a large wad of cash in a neighborhood where illegal drugs are often sold is engaged in illegal activity. By contrast, police may not have reasonable grounds to suspect a similar person spotted walking near a business where people often make down payments on their new homes. As a general rule, the Fourth Amendment permits police to briefly stop and search someone if they reasonably suspect that person is engaged in illegal activity — or, in an immigration case, of being illegally present in the United States. To be sure, there are some things that law enforcement may almost never consider when determining whether to stop a particular individual. In Kansas v. Glover (2020), for example, the Court said that police may not target someone based on 'nothing more than a demographic profile' or stop and question someone about their immigration status because of their 'Mexican ancestry.' Frimpong's conclusion that ICE may not target someone solely because of their 'apparent race or ethnicity' is consistent with Glover. But Frimpong's conclusion that law enforcement may never reasonably suspect someone of being undocumented solely based on their presence in a particular location is probably a bit of a stretch. As a federal appeals court explained in a 2014 case, day laborer jobs are 'one of the limited options for workers without documents.' These jobs are often grueling, unreliable, and underpaid. They are unattractive to virtually anyone who is authorized to work in the United States and, thus, have less-demanding and better-paying job options available to them. There are at least some cases, in other words, where a law enforcement officer could reasonably suspect someone of being undocumented if they are consistently seen at a location where undocumented workers seek jobs as day laborers — what Frimpong described as a 'day laborer pick up site.' It is difficult to come up with categorical rules governing which factors law enforcement may consider when deciding whom to stop. Even race may be an acceptable factor in very limited circumstances; if multiple witnesses to a robbery tell police that they saw an East Asian man commit the crime, for example, then police could reasonably limit their search to people who appear to be East Asian. This is one reason why cases like Lyons exist: to prevent judges from handing down categorical rules that prevent police from conducting lawful investigations.
Newsweek
7 hours ago
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ICE Makes Major Change for New Recruits
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