Testimony from two FBI agents laid bare the alleged ties between a trio of bumbling Azerbaijani assassins and Iranian officials seeking to have one of their enemies murdered at New York City. Two of the alleged assassins are on trial for plotting, unsuccessfully, to kill the Iranian dissident, Masih Alinejad, in her Brooklyn front yard. On Monday, the jury saw encrypted messages and call logs detailing months-long communications about the alleged murder-for-hire plot.    

“The money is ready,” one of the text messages read. 

“Is 30k if they ask u How much (it) is,” another text message said.  

According to an investigation conducted by the FBI, one of the defendants, Rafat Amirov, sent the text message to the other defendant, Polad Omarov, on July 18, 2022, indicating that a downpayment of $30,000 for the murder-for-hire job was ready to be picked up. 

Soon after, on the same day, the alleged hitman, Khalid Mehdiyev, sent a photograph of several rubber banded bundles of cash inside a black plastic bag to Mr. Omarov, who then forwarded the picture to Mr. Amirov, adding in a message, “They picked (it) up, brother.”       

Mr. Mehdiyev testified last week, as the Sun reported, that he used $2,000 of the $ 30,000 to buy an AK-47 with the serial number shaved off. The 27-year-old was living in the Bronx at the time and, prosecutors say, was contracted by the two defendants, who were overseas, to assassinate the Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejad at her home in Brooklyn.  

The plot never came to fruition. Mr. Mehdiyev was arrested by detectives from the New York Police Department on July 28, 2022, while driving away from Ms. Alinejad’s house and speeding through a stop sign. Officers found the loaded AK-47 in his car. Mr. Mehdiyev eventually pleaded guilty to numerous charges and decided to cooperate with the government in hopes of a lower sentence. Mr. Amirov and Mr. Omarov, however, were arrested overseas and brought back to New York to face trial. They have pleaded not-guilty.         

The three men are natives of Azerbaijan, a country by the Caspian Sea that borders Iran in the south, Russia in the north, Georgia and Armenia in the west. The men also belong to the same crime organization. In his testimony, Mr. Mehdiyev called it “the Russian mob.” Yet an expert, who testified on Friday, suggested that “Russian speaking mob” may be more accurate. 

The expert, Louise Shelly of George Mason University, who is also the founder and executive director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center, explained that the crime organization has members from several countries that were part of the former Soviet Union, such as Azerbaijan, not just from Russia. Its members, Ms. Shelly said, engage in money laundering, extortion, bribery, kidnapping and robbery as far as Europe and North America. Whether or not she had previously stated that the mobsters also take on murder-for-hire jobs became a point of discussion between the prosecution and the defense. 

Prosecutors intend to prove that the three men were contracted by people with ties to the Iranian government to kill Ms. Alinejad, because she has been a fierce and outspoken critic of the Iranian regime for decades. Ms. Alinejad, 48, fled Iran, where she was born and raised, in 2009 and  became an American citizen in 2019.       

“They were going to gun her down at home, right here in New York City. The defendants were hired because they are violent organized crime leaders,” ​​Assistant U.S. Attorney Jacob Gutwillig said in his opening statement last week. “That’s because the government of Iran wanted, desperately, to see Masih Alinejad murdered.”

Mr. Gutwillig told the jury that the evidence “just speaks for itself.” He said, “digital evidence, hundreds and hundreds of private, encrypted messages and pictures recovered by law enforcement,” and “data showing dozens of calls between the defendants” would all add “up to make a timeline of the plot to kill Ms. Alinejad, a minute-by-minute account of the crime.” 

On Monday, the jury got to see this minute-by-minute account during the testimony of FBI agent Justin Tuerack, who was recently promoted to the role of supervisor special agent of the Iran Squad, after having served on the squad for seven years. 

The encrypted messages, alleged to have been forwarded by Mr. Amirov to Mr. Omarov in July 2022, showed several screenshots of Ms. Alinejad’s house in Brooklyn, of her exact address, and pictures of Ms. Alinejad. The messages, it appeared, had been forwarded to Mr. Amirov from someone who spoke Farsi, the language spoken in Iran.  The characters on the top corner of the screenshot, depicting the time and battery charge of the phone, were Farsi characters. 

According to the evidence, the chain of communication went as follows: The Iranian official communicated with Mr. Amirov, who then sent the messages to Mr. Omarov, who then communicated with Mr. Mehdiyev, who was the man on the ground in New York. 

After having received the address, on or about July 13, 2022, Mr. Mehdiyev allegedly drove down to Ms. Alinejad’s house in Brooklyn. He recorded a creepy video, which the jury watched, of her front yard in the dark, and sent the video to Mr. Omarov, who then forwarded it to Mr. Amirov, intending to show that the home of their target had been located. 

Over the next 15 days, up until Mr. Mehdiyev’s arrest on July 28, 2022, constant messages were sent back and forth between the three men. It is not exactly clear why, but Mr. Mehdiyev lied in many of his messages to Mr. Omarov. 

He testified last week that he falsely claimed to have the house covered “from both sides.” He informed Mr. Omarov that he had another guy at the back, ready to shoot Ms. Alinejad in case she would step out into her backyard, while he was positioned in the front. 

“We blocked from sides. There will be a show once she/he steps out,” A text message allegedly sent from Mr. Mehdiyev to Mr. Omarov, and on to Mr. Amirov, read. 

But Mr. Mehdiyev told the jury that he lied and was in fact acting alone. He also testified that he informed Mr. Omarov he had “a girl” with him, who would look at the beautiful flowers in Ms. Alinejad’s front yard to lure the journalist outside so he could shoot her.   

“I brought a girl so she plays with the flowers.” A message from July 25, 2022 read that was sent from Mr. Mehdiyev to Mr. Omarov and forwarded to Mr. Amirov. 

Mr. Amirov responded to the text with a picture of the movie star Dwayne Johnson, also known by his ring name, The Rock, extending a fist, indicating he was applauding the plan. He then instructed Mr. Mehdiyev to “have the girl knock on the door,” and ask Ms. Alinejad if she could have some of the flowers from her front yard to plant them in her own garden. 

But there was no girl, Mr. Mehdiyev testified last week, without giving a reason why. “Guy opened the door. He said she’s sleeping, her (she) feel sick, come back tomorrow or after tomorrow. We have nice flowers. She’ll give her one,”  Mr. Mehdiyev reported in text messages from Brooklyn. 

The evidence further showed that on July 27, 2022, one day before his arrest, Mr. Amirov received information from his alleged Iran connection that Ms. Alinejad had been at home, “by the door,” talking on her phone, indicating that the Iranians were monitoring her cellphone activities. Mr. Amirov also sent to Mr. Omarov links to the live Instagram broadcasts Ms. Alinejad was giving from inside her house. Mr. Omarov then forwarded them to Mr. Mehdiyev. 

“She is at home,” Mr. Amirov texted Mr. Omarov.  

But somehow Mr. Mehdiyev could not get the job done, because “no one opened the door,” one message read, or “again a man opened the door.”    

On the day of the arrest, Mr. Mehdiyev informed his partner that he had spoken to someone who was going to rent him a room inside Ms. Alinejad’s house. Another lie. He also sent a video he took of the flowers in the front yard to show he was at the house, and another video showing the rifle inside a suitcase in his car. 

“Keep the car clean,” Mr. Amirov’s alleged text read, possibly suggesting that Mr. Mehdiyev should not kill her in the car or stash her body in the trunk. 

After Mr. Mehdiyev’s arrest, Mr. Amirov and Mr. Omarov continued to communicate, the messages showed. 

By the end of the day, ​​Assistant U.S. Attorneys Michael Lockard finally addressed what the prosecutors are calling “The Bazghandi Network Defendants,” the Iranians said to be affiliated with the regime’s military elite who allegedly plotted the assassination. 

The district judge, Colleen McMahon, read a stipulation, an agreement of facts by both parties, to brief the jury about the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, an agency under the authority of Iran’s Supreme Leader, which also has an intelligence department referred to in the indictment as IRGC-IO. 

“Since its inception in 2009, the IRGC-IO has established itself as a domestic and international unit focused on targeting journalists, activists, dual Iranian nationals, and others who oppose the abuses and human rights violations perpetrated by the Iranian regime,” the indictment explains. “Former IRGC-IO Counterespionage Department Chief (Ruhollah) Bazghandi has been involved in planning and overseeing IRGC-IO operations in Iraq and Syria as well as lethal operations against Israeli nationals. Bazghandi has also been involved in plots to assassinate journalists and Israeli nationals in Istanbul.” 

The jury now saw photographs of Ruhollah Bazghandi standing next to an airplane, greeting the former foreign minister of Iran on a visit in Syria in August, 2023, showing that he is, at the very least, acquainted with top Iranian government officials. 

Then, prosecutors presented alleged electronic communication between Mr. Bazghandi and another Iranian man by the name of Haj Taher, who allegedly communicated with two more men, who are all listed in the indictment as defendants, but have not been detained. 

The FBI collected data from Google searches, showing that three of the alleged defendants googled Ms. Alinejad and her family members, the price of the dollar, the time in New York, the Brooklyn office for now-shuttered Voice of America, where Ms. Alinejad was working at the time, and the name Mr. Amirov, or rather, “Rafat the Thief.” 

On October 4, 2022, roughly two months after Mr. Mehdiyev’s arrest, one of the men alleged to be involved in the plot, Hossein Sedighi, sent a text message to Mr. Taher, which he was to be forwarded to “your boss and the mafia.” 

The text message read, “if the job gets no results by Saturday, there will be nothing left to say between us … Additionally, you must return the deposit money, or else you will have to face consequences …” In other words, the Iranians wanted their deposit back if Ms. Alinejad was not assassinated by Saturday.  

A defense attorney, Michael Martin, who represents Mr. Amirov, questioned the certainty of the electronic evidence. 

In his cross-examination of another FBI agent, Shivam Amin, an IT and cyber security specialist, who testified in the morning, Mr. Martin pointed out that his client “was arrested on January 25, 2023 and the phone was not received by the FBI until February 6th, 2023.” 

Mr. Martin was insinuating that someone else could have taken the phone during that time period and added information to it. He further questioned if the FBI was in fact certain that the person using the WhatsApp account, alleged to be Mr. Amirov’s, was in fact Mr. Amirov. 

“You can’t say with certainty,” Mr. Martin pressed, “who was using the .. . WhatsApp account at any given time?”.   

“That’s correct,” Mr. Amin answered. 

But under redirect from the prosecution, the agent testified that based on his analysis both the WhatsApp account and a second phone number, alleged to have been used by Mr. Amirov, were “connected to the same phone” retrieved by agents during Mr. Amirov’s arrest overseas in January of last year. 

Defense attorneys for both Mr. Amirov, whose 46th birthday was on Monday, as pictures of his numerous ID cards exposed, and for Mr. Omarov, 40, will continue their cross-examination on Tuesday, and attempt to cast doubt on the prosecution’s intricate conspiracy theory. The Iranian government has denied any involvement in the failed assassination attempt.