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NYC: man armed with AK-47 arrested for loitering at the home of a prominent Iranian dissident

Masih Alinejad was the target of a kidnapping attempt last year. "My crime is to give voice to the voiceless. The administration must get tough on terrorism."

Masih Alineyad

Masih Alineyad, at a rally in San Francisco (California), on 25 July 2009 / Steve Rhodes-Flickr.

Published by
Mario Noya

Security forces arrested last Thursday an individual carrying an AK-47 assault rifle in the vicinity of the New York home of Iranian-American journalist and activist Masih Alinejad, Benjamin Weiser reported Sunday in The New York Times.

According to the complaint filed Friday in Manhattan Federal Court, the individual, identified as Khalid Mehdiyev, 23, spent at least two days last week (Wednesday and Thursday) prowling Alineyad's Brooklyn neighborhood. On Thursday he spent hours in the vicinity of the activist's home; he even stood on the porch, looked inside and tried to open the door, as recorded by security cameras installed in the house.

He was intercepted that same afternoon after running a stop sign. The officers who stopped him found that he did not have his driver's license on him and in fact had an expired one. During the search of the vehicle, the police officers found several license plates, more than 1,000 dollars in cash and an AK-47 assault rifle with plenty of ammunition and the serial number erased. As well as an expired employment permit issued by the Citizenship and Immigration Services.

As Melissa Koenig recalls in the online version of the Daily Mail, Mehdiyev's arrest comes a year after Alineyad denounced an Iranian plot to kidnap her and take her back to the Islamic Republic via Venezuela. The four accused of attempting to kidnap Alinejad are Iranians residing in Iran: Alireza Shavaroghi Farahani, alias Vezerat Salimi or Haj Ali, 51; Mahmud Jazein, 43; Kiya Sadeghi, 36; and Omid Nuri, 46, who are believed to be intelligence agents of the Tehran regime. A fifth individual, Nilufar Bahadorifar, a California resident also originally from Iran, was charged with procuring financial assistance for the scheme.

At the time, Alinejad said, "This shows that [the ayatollahs] are not afraid of America, that they are afraid of me. Otherwise, they would not have sent anyone to kidnap me." And he called on the Biden Administration to show firmness toward Tehran:

It is an insult to all of us that a foreign country would come here and try to kidnap an American citizen. This is a threat to all Americans and all journalists. I want Biden to condemn it. This is America.

In the face of this new threat to her integrity, Alinejad, who has been moved with her family to safety, said:

I came here, to America, to be safe. First they tried to kidnap me and now a man with a loaded gun has tried to enter my house. It's disturbing.

On Twitter she has declared herself "shocked" and, after thanking the feds for the work they take, she has demanded the Biden Administration to "do more" to "protect American citizens" and to be "tougher" on terrorism.

Masih Alineyad, 45, is very active on Twitter in defense of Iranian women's rights, curtailed by the ayatollahs' regime. Her memoir is eloquently titled The Wind in my Hair and has been translated into Italian.

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