Iranian American human rights activists expresses defiance over Iranian plots to kill her and Trump

BERLIN (AP) — In the middle of a Berlin hotel cafe, Masih Alinejad raises her voice and starts singing at the top of her lungs in Farsi, as waiters turn to watch along with the three German government bodyguards assigned to protect her.

“I blossom through my wounds and my scars,” she translates the lyrics as. “Because I am a woman. I am a woman. I am a woman.”

Alinejad was expressing her defiance and asserting her right to express herself following the news of Iranian murder-for-hire plots to kill her and Donald Trump that were disclosed by the U.S. Justice Department. She said that some Iranian women had been jailed for singing.

The Iranian American human rights activist, who was in Berlin on Saturday to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall together with other human rights activists from around the globe, told The Associated Press in an interview that despite the shock of the news, she felt more determination than ever to continue fighting for women's rights in Iran.

“They want to get rid of me. When they want me dead, it means that I’m doing something. I’m hurting them so bad," Alinejad, 48, said, referring to the Iranian government. “I’m echoing the voice of powerful women and that scares them.”

She raised her hand in a defiant fist repeatedly during the interview.

On Friday, the U.S. Justice Department said that it was charging a man who said he had been tasked by a government official before this week’s election with planning the assassination of Trump.

Investigators were told of the plan by Farhad Shakeri, an accused Iranian government asset who spent time in American prisons for robbery and who authorities say maintains a network of criminal associates enlisted by Tehran for surveillance and murder-for-hire plots.

Shakeri is at large and remains in Iran. Two other men — identified as Jonathan Loadholt and Carlisle Rivera by the U.S. Justice Department — were arrested on charges that Shakeri recruited them to follow and kill Alinejad, who has endured multiple Iranian murder-for-hire plots foiled by law enforcement.

The Justice Department alleges that the two men spent months conducting surveillance on her and, during their efforts to locate and kill her, shared messages about their progress and photographs.

Around February, they traveled to Fairfield University in Connecticut, where Alinejad was scheduled to appear and took photos of the campus.

Around April, Shakeri sent Rivera a series of voice notes discussing their efforts to locate and kill her, the Justice Department said in a statement Friday.

In one voice note, Shakeri told Rivera that “you gotta wait and have patience to catch her either going in the house or coming out, or following her out somewhere and taking care of it,” the statement said.

“It’s scary. But at the same time, I was very pleased that the U.S. law enforcement is protecting me,” Alinejad said, recounting her call with American security officials.

“The same person who was trying to kill President Trump was assigned to kill me as well. I mean, that’s a badge of honor,” she added.

In Tehran, Esmail Baghaei, an Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman, rejected the report and called it a plot by Israel-linked circles to make Iran-U.S. relations more complicated, the official IRNA news agency reported.

Alinejad is a prominent figure on Farsi-language satellite channels abroad that critically view Iran, and she has worked as a contractor for U.S.-funded Voice of America’s Farsi-language network since 2015. She fled Iran following the country’s disputed 2009 presidential election and became a U.S. citizen in October 2019.

Alinejad accused the Iranian government of continuing to oppress women in Iran and make them wear the mandatory headscarf, or hijab, even two years after the death of Mahsa Amini that sparked weekslong mass protests.

The fact that the Iranian government has repeatedly tried to kill her, she said, "makes me more determined to give voice to powerful women inside Iran who are facing the same killers every single day.”