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Become a memberTwo citizens of Georgia and Azerbaijan have been found guilty in the US of plotting to murder an exiled Iranian journalist.
On Friday, the US Justice Department announced that Polad Omarov, 40, and Rafat Amirov, 46, had been found guilty of plotting to kill Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad in exchange for $500,000.
The New York Times reported that Omarov was a citizen of Georgia and Amirov a citizen of Azerbaijan and Russia.
‘The defendants participated in a brazen plot to kill an Iranian American dissident in New York who criticised the regime in Iran’, Acting Assistant Director Roman Rozhavsky of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division said.
The Justice Department stated the two were members of an organised crime group called ‘the Organisation’, which has been variously described in the US media as a Russian or Eastern European criminal network. They added that the two were hired to kill Alinejad by ‘high-ranking members of the [Iranian] Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)’.
Iran had initially attempted to kidnap Alinejad, but when those attempts failed, the IRGC recruited Omarov and Amirov to assassinate her in the US. The two then involved another member of the Organisation, Khalid Mehdiyev, who lived in the US.
The Justice Department said that Mehdiyev surveilled Alinejad and reported back to Omarov in July 2022 that he was ready to kill her. Mehdiyev was then arrested, and when Omarov was unable to contact him, he then communicated with Mehdiyev’s mother, threatening to kill her and her other son if she could not locate him.
Omarov and Amirov were found guilty of five counts, which could lead to life in prison. The sentencing is expected to be announced in September 2025.
The Justice Department’s press release was scant on the details of Omarov and Amirov’s arrest — it did not say how the two were located, or where they were arrested.
However, in its list of acknowledgements, the Justice Department thanked the Czech government for their assistance in the matter.
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