In the summer of 2022, a group of people plotting the murder of an Iranian dissident living in New York City began sharing “chilling intelligence,” a federal prosecutor said in court on Tuesday.
That included photographs of the dissident, Masih Alinejad, her husband, their son and their Brooklyn home. The group also shared information about where she bought coffee and what time she watered the flowers in her garden. They even kept track of when the program she hosted appeared on Voice of America Persian, a U.S. government-owned broadcaster, and when she talked on the phone.
The aim was to retaliate against Ms. Alinejad for criticizing one of Iran’s “core rules” requiring women to wear head scarves, the prosecutor, Jacob Gutwillig, said during his opening statement in the trial of two men, Rafat Amirov and Polad Omarov, charged in the failed plot against her.
Ms. Alinejad had “shined a light on the government of Iran’s oppression of women,” Mr. Gutwillig told jurors, and “enraged the regime.”
The two men “were hired by the government of Iran to assassinate an American citizen on United States soil,” Mr. Gutwillig said. “They were going to gun her down at home, right here in New York City.”
The plot against Ms. Alinejad fell apart when police officers responding to a report of suspicious activity arrested an Azerbaijani man, who the authorities said had tried to open the door to her home. The officers then found an AK-47-style assault rifle inside the man’s vehicle.
Prosecutors said Mr. Amirov and Mr. Omarov, whom they have described as members of a Russian criminal organization called the Thieves-in-Law, had sent the Azerbaijani man to kill Ms. Alinejad.
The two men “were hired by the government of Iran to assassinate an American citizen on United States soil,” Mr. Gutwillig said. “They were going to gun her down at home, right here in New York City.”
A moment after Mr. Gutwillig finished his opening statement, a lawyer for Mr. Amirov suggested that his client had been falsely implicated by the man with the rifle, Khalid Mehdiyev, who was trying to save himself by blaming someone else.
Someone in Iran had “hatched a plot,” the lawyer, Michael W. Martin, told jurors, but Mr. Amirov “was dragged into this case” unjustly. Mr. Martin added that it was a fiction that Mr. Amirov had schemed against Ms. Alinejad, adding that, on the contrary, “others plotted against him.”
“There is no audio, no video of Mr. Amirov committing or confessing to any crime,” he told jurors.
A lawyer for Mr. Omarov took a slightly different tack, suggesting that his client had communicated on some level with figures in Iran but only as a way to steal from them.
Calling his client “a scam artist,” that lawyer, Michael Scott Perkins, said that Mr. Omarov had cheated the Iranian government out of “a lot of money” but had done little to cause harm to Ms. Alinejad.
“Mr. Omarov had no intent, no agreement for anyone to kill Ms. Alinejad,” Mr. Perkins said.
The statements from the prosecution and defense in Federal District Court in Manhattan provided a glimpse of what was to come during the first detailed examination of what U.S. government officials have described as a brazen and relentless effort by figures tied to the Iranian government to target Ms. Alinejad, a journalist and commentator who left the country in 2009.
Since then, she has emerged as a sharp and persistent critic of the government there, known for starting a campaign against the laws that require women to wear head scarves. In 2018, women in Iran took part in rare protests that seemed tied to Ms. Alinejad’s campaign, removing their scarves in public and waving them on sticks, like flags.
That year, according to prosecutors, government officials in Iran offered to pay Ms. Alinejad’s relatives to induce her to travel to Turkey, planning to abduct her once she arrived. That tactic failed and soon afterward, prosecutors have said, a network in Iran led by an intelligence official named Alireza Shavaroghi Farahani, conspired to kidnap Ms. Alinejad and take her from New York City to Iran.
Last year, an Iranian woman who unwittingly assisted in that effort, providing money to an investigator in the United States who was also unaware of the plot, was sentenced to four years in prison after pleading guilty to conspiring to violate U.S. sanctions against Iran. In November, the Justice Department announced murder-for-hire charges against three men newly accused of plotting to kill Ms. Alinejad.
U.S. officials have been making their case publicly against Mr. Amirov and Mr. Omarov, who have been charged with murder for hire and conspiracy, since early 2023 when an indictment naming them was unsealed. At the time, Christopher Wray, then the F.B.I. director, said: “The conduct charged shows how far Iranian actors are willing to go to silence critics, even attempting to assassinate a U.S. citizen on American soil.”
Several Iranian men have also been charged in the case, including Ruhollah Bazghandi, a brigadier general in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, but are not in U.S. custody.
In his opening statement, Mr. Gutwillig said the jury would hear testimony from Ms. Alinejad and from a cooperating witness who was once part of the plot and would provide “a terrifying inside view,” including descriptions of “stalking Ms. Alinejad and preparing to kill her.”
A couple of hours later Mr. Mehdiyev took the stand and testified that he was part of the Russian mob. He said that he had pleaded guilty to several federal charges in Manhattan, including attempted murder and conspiracy, as well as to federal charges in Brooklyn that included racketeering.
Mr. Mehdiyev told jurors that he was facing mandatory minimum sentences of five years and 10 years as a result of those pleas, but could also be sentenced to up to life in prison.
He acknowledged being at Ms. Alinejad’s home in Brooklyn in 2022, adding: “I was there to try to kill the journalist.”