A Brooklyn man was sentenced to 15 years in prison on Wednesday for taking part in what prosecutors called a failed Iran-backed murder-for-hire plot against Masih Alinejad, a prominent Iranian dissident living in the US, the Justice Department said.
Carlisle Rivera, also known as "Pop," previously pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire and one count of conspiracy to commit stalking before US District Judge Lewis Liman for the Southern District of New York, who imposed Wednesday's sentence, the Justice Department said in a statement.
Alinejad, who fled Iran in 2009, is a longtime critic of Iran's head-covering laws and a journalist. She has promoted videos of women violating those laws to her millions of social media followers. She was living in Brooklyn at the time of the alleged plot on her life.
The case was part of a crackdown by the Justice Department on what it calls transnational repression: the targeting by authoritarian governments of political opponents on foreign soil.
Prosecutors said Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its intelligence officials have repeatedly tried to target Alinejad.
Iran has dismissed as baseless allegations that its intelligence officers sought to kidnap or kill her.
Other people have also been convicted in the US and sentenced in relation to the alleged plot.
'This is our Berlin Wall,' Iranian activist Masih Alinejad tells 'Post' of protests
As images of mass protests and violent crackdowns continue to emerge from Iran, Alinejad says the world is witnessing not only a popular uprising, but a defining moral test for Western leaders - "this is our Berlin wall," she stated in an interview with The Jerusalem Post published on January 13.
“When I see pictures of lifeless bodies stacked on top of each other, my heart is pounding,” Alinejad said in an emotional conversation. “But what makes me furious is not only the pain, it’s the silence outside Iran.”
Alinejad described a grim ritual familiar to millions of Iranians living abroad: zooming in on photographs of the dead, searching for the faces of family members. With internet blackouts imposed by Tehran, she said, exile itself has become a form of psychological torture. “We don’t know if our families are alive or dead. This is deliberate cruelty.”