For nearly a decade, people with ties to Iran’s government have been accused of plotting to kidnap or murder Masih Alinejad, a journalist and dissident who left the country in 2009 and an impassioned critic of its leaders.
On Thursday, a jury in Manhattan returned guilty verdicts in the first criminal case stemming from those attempts to go to trial.
Two members of the Russian mob, who prosecutors said had plotted to kill Ms. Alinejad at the behest of a network in Iran that included a brigadier general in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, were found guilty in Federal District Court of offenses including murder for hire and conspiracy.
Key evidence against the men, Rafat Amirov and Polad Omarov, came from a third member of the mob who was arrested in 2022 with an AK-47-style assault rifle after the authorities said he had stepped onto Ms. Alinejad’s porch in Brooklyn and tried to enter her home.
That man, Khalid Mehdiyev, said on the stand that Mr. Omarov had sent him to kill Ms. Alinejad. He also testified that Mr. Amirov later spoke with him while they were both in federal custody and admitted that he, too, had been part of the plot.
The conviction of Mr. Amirov and Mr. Omarov brought some measure of resolution to what U.S. officials have described as an unrelenting retaliation effort against an Iranian dissident who had agitated for women’s rights from abroad.
Prosecutors said that in 2018 Iranian officials tried unsuccessfully to bribe Ms. Alinejad’s relatives in Iran to lure her to Turkey so she could be kidnapped. Another attempted kidnapping a few years later, planned for New York City, also failed.
“The Iranian regime spent years attempting to harass, smear, intimidate and even kidnap Ms. Alinejad,” a prosecutor, Michael Lockard, told jurors during his summation on Wednesday. “When those efforts failed, the government of Iran put a $500,000 bounty on her head, blood money that Mr. Amirov and Mr. Omarov were all too eager to claim.”
In addition to Mr. Amirov and Mr. Omarov, several other men were indicted in the 2022 plot but have not been taken into U.S. custody. Among them are an accused Russian mob member named Zialat Mamedov and four Iranian men, including the Revolutionary Guards general, Ruhollah Bazghandi.
Prosecutors have said that Mr. Bazghandi’s network initiated the plot against Ms. Alinejad. A network member maintained contact with Mr. Amirov, a citizen of Azerbaijan and Russia who was living in Iran, prosecutors said. They added that Mr. Amirov turned to Mr. Omarov, a Georgian living in Eastern Europe, to carry out the plot.
Mr. Mehdiyev, an Azerbaijani man then living in Yonkers, N.Y., testified that Mr. Omarov called him saying that people he knew were willing to pay $160,000 for Ms. Alinejad’s murder.
Within days, Mr. Mehdiyev had bought the assault rifle and was staking out Ms. Alinejad’s home. At one point, according to evidence, Mr. Omarov told Ms. Mehdiyev to make sure any attack on Ms. Alinejad was fatal, writing: “Put one more bullet on journalist head.”
Ms. Alinejad appeared as a witness, saying that she had glimpsed a man in the summer of 2022, the time when he was tracking her, standing in her front garden and “staring into my eyes.”
Mr. Mehdiyev testified that he had seen Ms. Alinejad once as he strolled past her home. He said that by the time he returned to his vehicle for the rifle she had vanished.
During their summations, lawyers for Mr. Amirov and Mr. Omarov denounced Mr. Mehdiyev’s account as fantastical, saying he was trying to save himself by falsely implicating others.
“You will struggle to find anyone more untrustworthy than Mr. Mehdiyev, as so many of his friends discovered firsthand,” Mr. Amirov’s lawyer, Michael W. Martin, told jurors.
Mr. Omarov’s lawyer, Elena Fast, derided Mr. Mehdiyev, who had worked in and hung out at a Bronx pizzeria, calling him “a clown” and asking jurors to imagine him as the protagonist in an absurdist television series called “The Pizza Delivery Hit Man.”
She said that her client was merely a huckster who was trying to rip off whoever was trying to arrange Ms. Alinejad’s murder, but that he never planned to actually harm her: “This was a scam. He wanted to make some money.”
Mr. Mehdiyev’s testimony, which spanned three days, was the most riveting of the trial, delivered in a monotone with occasional errors in grammar and providing a detailed, inside view of the plot.
He described joining a group of mobsters known as the Thieves-in-Law as a teenager in Azerbaijan, then coming to the United States, where he committed crimes including extortion, theft and fraud. He also acknowledged ordering two murders overseas while in America, telling his handpicked hit man to carry those out while on the phone with him.
According to Mr. Mehdiyev’s testimony, Mr. Omarov sent him photos of Ms. Alinejad and her home and checked in on him daily, urging him to carry out his task. As pressure increased, Mr. Mehdiyev lied to Mr. Omarov, telling him he had obtained an accomplice and pretending to have rented a room inside Ms. Alinejad’s home.
His decision to step onto Ms. Alinejad’s porch was driven by a desire to bolster that falsehood, Mr. Mehdiyev said. He made a video depicting his hand reaching toward Ms. Alinejad’s door and sent it to Mr. Omarov.
“I was trying to just show him I’m going inside,” he testified.
He added that he then got into a Subaru S.U.V. and drove off, concerned that the police might be nearby. Two officers pulled him over when he drove through a stop sign and arrested him when they learned that his license was suspended. A search of the vehicle turned up the assault rifle.
Prosecutors cited text messages showing that Mr. Mehdiyev’s arrest had sent ripples of concern through the Thieves-in-Law, with Mr. Omarov writing to Mr. Amirov: “I hope he will not make trouble for me.”
But Mr. Mehdiyev testified that Mr. Amirov had spoken freely when they met later inside a federal jail in Brooklyn. Mr. Amirov, he said, seemed confident that the charges would amount to little.
“He told me this is the fake case,” Mr. Mehdiyev said. “They don’t got nothing on us, we’ll be out in three months.”