NEW YORK — A California woman got four years in prison Friday for channeling funds to Iranian intelligence operatives in a plot to kidnap and murder Brooklyn-based dissident journalist and women’s rights activist Masih Alinejad.
Niloufar “Nellie” Bahadorifar, 48, who pleaded guilty to violating U.S. sanctions in December, didn’t know about the plan to kill Alinejad.
But the feds say she nevertheless played a crucial role in the spine-chilling plot by providing the Iranians access to U.S. banking services, acting as a go-between for four operatives of that country’s theocratic regime, and a U.S. private investigator.
Alinejad, an author and human rights activist who fled her native Iran in 2009, is a staunch critic of Iran’s oppression of women, particularly the regime’s mandate that they wear headscarves in public.
On Friday, she said her life had been forever altered by constantly having to look over her shoulder. Alinejad took no comfort in a tearful courtroom apology in which Bahadorifar told her she was “a hero to all Iranians.”
Bahadorifar used Alinejad’s name to play the victim, the Iranian journalist said outside the Manhattan federal courthouse.
“I’m not a hero. My heroes are those people who got killed by the Iranian regime and they never played victim the way that she did,” Alinejad said, adding that “killing, assassinating, is in the DNA of the Islamic Republic.”
“My heroes are the women inside Iran being bullied, being harassed, being raped, being, like, shot in their eyes. But they never give up,” she said. “Her statement was, ‘Masih is my hero. But I didn’t have any option but to listen to men in my country, to Revolutionary Guards in my country.’ I don’t accept that.”
In imposing the sentence, which includes three years post-release supervision, Manhattan Federal Court Judge Ronnie Abrams said she needed to deter others from assisting Iran’s theocratic regime.
Prosecutors said Bahadorifar may not have known about the plot, but she knew the players involved had connections to intelligence services.
“Niloufar Bahadorifar willfully violated sanctions and knowingly provided financial support to Iranian intelligence assets, who in turn were engaged in a plot to kidnap an Iranian human rights activist living in the United States whom the Iranian Government has sought to silence for years,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement.
“Assisting malign foreign governments by violating sanctions can have devastating consequences, including for those targeted by hostile regimes for retribution.”
In tearful statements to the court, Bahadorifar directly addressed Alinejad.
“I am so deeply sorry that my crimes brought so much discomfort into all your lives. To Ms. Alinejad, I am humiliated to have been involved in any attempt to harm you, even if I was unaware of it,” Bahadorifar said.
The feds in July 2021 indicted Bahadorifar alongside Alireza Shavaroghi Farahani, an Iranian intelligence official who resides in Iran, and four accomplices. They said the assassination plot included spying on her for months and researching the best way to kidnap her in Brooklyn and shove her in a military-style speedboat on the East River headed for Venezuela.
Bahadorifar started providing financial assistance to a family friend, an Iran-based operative involved in the plot, in 2015. That included adding him to a credit card account, maintaining various bank accounts at his request, facilitating his import of commodities to Iran, and other services.
She unwittingly paid a Manhattan-based private investigator — who was also in the dark about what he was doing — to surveil Alinejad’s home. Over nine months starting in 2019, Bahadorifar structured more than 120 individual deposits totaling more than $476,000, the feds said.
The kill plot included installing high-tech surveillance footage outside Alinejad’s Flatbush home. Last July, a year after the FBI foiled the initial plot to kidnap and kill her, Alinejad’s life was threatened again. A man who’d been staking her out for two days was arrested driving away from her house with a loaded AK-47-style rifle and a cache of ammunition.
In January, Manhattan prosecutors announced a sweeping indictment connected to the second plot, bringing charges against three members of the Eastern European gang “Thieves-in-Law.”
Bahadorifar’s lawyer, Jeffrey Lichtman, said his client was disappointed by the sentence and felt she was also a victim of the Iranian regime. He said she had been duped into the plot.
“Ms. Bahadorifar was held responsible for the activities of the worst terror state on Earth,” Lichtman said.
“It’s disappointing but understandable with respect to the political climate in America right now. But unfortunately, (that) Ms. Bahadorifar, who’s never done a bad thing in her life — has raised a son on her own under tremendously difficult conditions with an abusive ex-husband — (has) to go to jail now and get a four-year sentence is a tough, tough pill to swallow.”
