MANHATTAN (CN) - A federal jury started deliberating Thursday an attempted murder-for-hire case that could see two purported members of the Russian mob face decades in prison.

Prosecutors say that Rafat Amirov and Polad Omarov took "blood money" from the Iranian government to assassinate journalist and activist Masih Alinejad on U.S. soil. They claimed that Alinejad's ongoing social media campaign, which encourages women to defy Iran's mandatory hijab laws, "enraged the regime" and prompted it to place a $500,000 bounty on her head.

"Amirov and Omarov were all too eager to claim it," Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Lockard said in the government's closing.

Lockard added that that killing was "terrifyingly close" to coming to fruition, but the hired gun - an Azerbaijani man who admitted to being a member of Russian organized crime - botched the hit and was arrested by police officers in New York City.

That man was Khalid Mehdiyev, a 27-year-old living in Yonkers, New York, who testified against the defendants after pleading guilty to Alinejad's attempted assassination in Brooklyn. Mehdiyev was the government's star witness in the weeklong trial, testifying that Omarov tasked him with the killing after Amirov got the gig from an Iranian government official.

Mehdiyev said that he stalked Alinejad at her home for days with one goal in mind: 

"Shoot the journalist, kill the journalist."

Alinejad told jurors that she encountered the "gigantic" would-be hitman lingering around her sunflower garden just days before his arrest. While she found his behavior "a little bit suspicious" - Mehdiyev apparently had his phone out and was recording her house - she said she convinced herself that he was just taking pictures of her garden.

"He was in the sunflowers staring into my eyes," Alinejad testified earlier this week. 

The defense rested its case earlier this week without calling any witnesses. Instead, Amirov and Omarov's lawyers focused on attacking the credibility of Mehdiyev as "the most untrustworthy of witnesses." 

Omarov's attorney, Elena Fast, insisted that there was never any intent from her client to have Alinejad killed at all. She claimed that her client was merely trying to scam the Iranian government by hiring Mehdiyev, a "clown" and a "liar" who never had the capability of carrying out the murder plot.

Fast called into question Mehdiyev's criminal past, honing in on his day job as the manager of a pizza joint called Peppino's; Mehdiyev testified that he lived a life of crime on behalf of the Russian mob while he simultaneously ran the shop.

Accepting that testimony would be "absurd," Fast claimed, calling Mehdiyev the "world's most dishonest Peppino's Pizza manager."

NYPD officers arrested Mehdiyev on July 29, 2022, after he blew a stop sign near Alinejad's home in Brooklyn. Police found a loaded AK-47, 66 rounds of ammunition and a ski mask in Mehdiyev's car.

Even with his cooperation, Mehdiyev faces at least 15 years in prison after pleading guilty to crimes in both the Southern District of New York and the Eastern District of New York.

Amirov and Omarov face 16 criminal counts each for the supposed scheme, including murder-for-hire and racketeering charges. If found guilty, they're likely to face decades in prison. They could have been up for the death penalty, had Alinejad been killed.

Jurors started deliberating just before 1 p.m. on Thursday.

Alinejad, who has lived in exile in the U.S. since 2009, testified Tuesday about her past as a reporter in Iran's parliament. She said she ruffled some feathers in the regime when she published the parliament members' pay slips.

After Alinejad left Iran, she amassed a large social media following while continuing to criticize the regime from overseas. Her most prolific work of activism is her "My Stealthy Freedom" campaign, which encourages Iranian women to share videos of themselves walking around in public without mandatory head coverings.

Source: Courthouse News Service