Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad describes chilling moment she saw amatuerish would-be assassin staring at her
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 allegedl...