Iranian journalist and murder-for-hire target Masih Alinejad described in court Tuesday the moment she saw her bungling would-be killer staring straight into her eyes through her pristine sunflower patch — but figured the “gigantic” hitman was just admiring her garden.
The spine-tingling run-in happened July 28, 2022 — which is the same day amateurish assassin Khalid Mehdiyev got picked up by the local cops in Brooklyn with a ski mask and a loaded AK-47 in his car right near Alinejad’s Flatbush home.
A self-described women’s rights activist who’s been targeted by the Iranian regime several times since fleeing the country in 2009, Alinejad told a jury in Manhattan federal court that she’d just gotten home from a trip to San Francisco that day when she noticed “the big guy” gawking at her.
“I was with a friend, and I went to my backyard garden to prepare for [another] trip to Connecticut,” she said. “I just had all the tomatoes, basil, cucumbers in my hands. I was walking to go to my inside door. When I was walking in the drive path, I saw the guy — the big guy.”
When asked to describe the self-professed Russian mobster, she called him “gigantic” — but said he seemed like just another wandering Brooklynite at the time.
“He had a phone in his hand … I saw he was talking,” she said, adding that she mistook his phone conversation for an attempt to talk to her.
But something about the leering 27-year-old struck her wrong. And after going inside, she raced to her front door to retrieve a key she’d forgotten.
That’s when she saw him.
“He was like, in the sunflowers, staring into my eyes,” Alinejad said. “Then I got really panicked, but I didn’t know anything.”
In the end, she thought he was probably just taking pictures of “my beautiful sunflowers,” as others who stroll through the neighborhood tend to.
But she should have trusted her intuition.
Mehdiyev, a pizza place worker who doubled as a mob henchman, was allegedly there to kill her that day on orders from Rafat Amirov and Polad Omarov, Azerbaijan nationals who are accused of hiring Mehdiyev to clip the exiled journalist.
The criminal pair have pleaded not guilty to the charges, which could imprison them for decades if they’re convicted.
Agents of the Iranian government have been hunting Alinejad relentlessly since she fled the Middle Eastern country in 2009, but their barbarous schemes have so far fallen short.
Omarov and Amirov are now on trial for murder-for-hire and attempted murder in aid of racketeering for the plot — and authorities have said they and Mehdiyev were part of the same gang in their shared home country.
But the plan — for which the Iranians paid the pair about $500,000 — went ridiculously awry when Mehdiyev tipped his hand by trying to open her door, ordering food to his car as he lurked outside and then running a stop sign as the cops trailed him.
Police arrested him in his Subaru Forester SUV with Illinois plates just outside Alinejad’s house, and found the loaded assault rifle with one in the chamber and the ski mask — which Mehdiyev plainly said in court he planned to use to kill the dissident.
Mehdiyev — who said he was paid $30,000 for the botched hit — decided to cooperate with the feds after pleading guilty to attempted murder and gun charges that could earn him at least 15 years in the clink.
It wasn’t the first time Alinejad has been targeted in America — a year before the aborted hit, an Iranian intelligence official and three others were indicted on charges they had plotted to kidnap Alinejad.
But she has said the Iranian government’s repeated attempts to kill her — which the nation has denied — have made her “more determined to give voice to powerful women inside Iran who are facing the same killers every single day.”
