NEW YORK — A plot to assassinate Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejad at her Brooklyn house got here “chillingly close to success,” prosecutors advised a choose who will sentence two purported Russian mobsters.

Prosecutors are looking for 55-year jail phrases for Rafat Amirov, 46, and Polad Omarov, 41, at their sentencing on Wednesday in Manhattan federal court docket. Prosecutors mentioned Amirov, of Iran, and Omarov, of Georgia, had been crime bosses within the Russian mob.

Attorneys for Amirov say he mustn’t spend greater than 13 years behind bars. Omarov’s attorneys referred to as for a 10-year jail sentence.

The lads had been convicted in a two-week March trial that featured dramatic testimony from a employed gunman and Alinejad, an writer, activist and contributor to Voice of America.

Alinejad mentioned in a message to supporters Tuesday that she deliberate to be in court docket to face the boys prosecutors say had been high-ranking members of the Gulici, a faction of the Russian Mob that carried out murders, assaults, extortions, kidnappings, robberies, and arsons in the USA and overseas.

“They’re going to obtain their sentence, and I will communicate my reality in my impression assertion,” she mentioned.

Alinejad, 49, led on-line campaigns encouraging ladies in Iran to file movies of themselves exposing their hair to protest edicts for head coverings in public.

Prosecutors mentioned Iranian intelligence officers first plotted in 2020 and 2021 to kidnap Alinejad within the U.S. and transfer her to Iran to silence her criticism.

Iran supplied $500,000 in a July 2022 try and kill Alinejad after efforts to harass, smear and intimidate her failed, prosecutors mentioned.

Prosecutors mentioned in court docket paperwork that Alinejad was focused by the Iranian authorities after she “devoted her life to exposing the cruelty, corruption, and tyranny of the Islamic Republic.”

When Alinejad, Amirov and Omarov had been supplied the $500,000 bounty, they “appeared fully incurious about who they had been plotting to homicide and why,” prosecutors wrote.

“Amirov and Omarov had been all in favour of one factor solely: their very own energy and wealth,” they mentioned.

Prosecutors mentioned the plot “got here chillingly close to success,” interrupted solely by the luck that Alinejad was out of city whereas a employed gunman tried persistently to find her and due to the “diligence and tenacity of American regulation enforcement, which detected and disrupted the plot in time.”

Attorneys for Amirov mentioned in court docket paperwork forward of sentencing that nobody was bodily damage and their shopper’s involvement within the plot was “minimal, if not non-existent.”

Attorneys for Omarov mentioned he deserved leniency as a result of his life had been threatened after a relative who was a reputed chief of the “thieves-in-law” prison group in Russia and Azerbaijan was killed in 2020. Omarov was extradited to the U.S. in February 2024, a 12 months after he was detained within the Czech Republic.

Alinejad testified on the March trial that she got here to the USA in 2009 after she was banned from masking Iran’s disputed presidential election and the newspaper the place she labored was shut down.

Establishing herself in New York Metropolis, she constructed an internet viewers of tens of millions and launched her “My Stealthy Freedom” marketing campaign to encourage Iranian ladies to reveal their hair when the morality police weren’t round.

Prosecutors have stored the investigation open. In October 2024, they introduced costs in opposition to a senior Iranian navy official and three others, none of whom are in custody.

Alinejad mentioned she has moved practically two dozen occasions for the reason that assassination plot was found.