USA: Three arrested for the attempted murder of journalist Mashih Alinejad

The US authorities announced today that they have arrested three people on charges that they attempted to assassinate the American journalist and activist of Iranian origin, Mashih Alinejad, in the US, at the behest of Tehran.

Khalid Mediyev was arrested on July 29, armed with an AK-47 rifle near Mashish Alinejad’s home in New York.

Human rights activist Alinejad is permanently based in the US and is a fierce critic of Tehran’s policies.

“He was not acting alone, he had accomplices, Rafat Amirov and Polad Omarov, members of an Eastern European criminal organization linked to Iran,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a news conference.

Amirov, who lived in Iran and led this operation, had been in contact “with people in Iran to carry out an assassination contract,” the minister said. He was arrested yesterday in the US and is due to appear before a federal judge later today.

Omarov was arrested in the Czech Republic on January 4 at the request of the US and is awaiting extradition.

These two men had organized the shipment of $30,000 to Khalid Mediyev, who was in the US, and had first been asked to track their target.

The minister recalled that four agents of the Iranian government had already been indicted in July 2021 for the attempted kidnapping of Mashih Alinejad three years earlier. Iran had denied any involvement in the case.

“We will not tolerate efforts by a foreign government to silence or harm Americans,” Garland said.

Masih Alinejad, 45, was forced to flee her country in 2009, and has been known since 2014 when she launched the “mystealthyfreedom” movement on social media, encouraging Iranian women to protest against the hijab requirement in their country.

“I just found out (…) that the three men hired by the Iranian regime to kill me on American soil have been indicted. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has been carrying out this type of terrorist act for four decades,” she commented on Twitter.

With 500,000 followers on her Twitter account and more than eight million on Instagram, where Masih Alinejad reposts dozens of photos or videos of Iranian women throwing off their hijabs every day, as well as sometimes violent images of the repression, she has become one of the spokespeople for the protest movement that has rocked Iran since the death of Masha Amini, 22, on September 16, after she was arrested in Tehran by moral police.

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