BERLIN (AP) — In the middle of a hotel cafe in Berlin, Masih Alinejad raises her voice and begins singing at the top of her lungs in Farsi as waiters turn to look at the three German government bodyguards assigned to protect her.
“I thrive through my wounds and my scars,” she translates the lyrics as. “Because I’m a woman. I am a woman. I am a woman.”
Alinejad expressed her defiance and asserted her right to speak out following news of Iranian assassin plots to kill her and Donald Trump revealed by the US Department of Justice. She said some Iranian women were imprisoned for singing.
The Iranian-American human rights activist, who was in Berlin on Saturday to join other human rights activists from around the world to mark the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, 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. If they want me dead, that means I’m doing something. I hurt them so much,” Alinejad, 48, said, referring to the Iranian government. “I echo the voices of powerful women and it scares them.”
During the interview, she repeatedly raised her hand in a defiant fist.
On Friday, the US Justice Department said it has charged a man who said he was charged by a government official with planning Trump’s assassination before this week’s election.
Investigators were alerted to the plan by Farhad Shakeri, an accused Iranian government official who has spent time in U.S. prisons for theft and who authorities say maintains a network of criminal associates enlisted by Tehran for surveillance and contract killings.
Shakeri is at large and remains in Iran. Two other men – identified by the US Department of Justice as Jonathan Loadholt and Carlisle Rivera – were arrested on charges that Shakeri recruited them to track and kill Alinejad, who has perpetrated multiple Iranian assassinations that have been foiled by law enforcement.
The Justice Department alleges that the two men surveilled her for months and shared messages about their progress and photos during their efforts to locate and kill her.
Around February, they traveled to Fairfield University in Connecticut, where Alinejad would appear and take 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, Shakeri told Rivera that “you must wait and be patient to catch her when she enters the house or comes out or follows her outside somewhere and takes care of her,” according to the statement.
“It’s scary. But at the same time, I was very happy that American law enforcement is protecting me,” Alinejad said, recounting her phone conversation with American security officials.
“The same person who tried to kill President Trump was ordered to kill me too. I mean, that’s a badge of honor,” she added.
In Tehran, Esmail Baghaei, a spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, dismissed the report, calling it a plot by Israeli-affiliated circles to complicate relations between Iran and the US, the official IRNA news agency reported.
Alinejad is a prominent figure on Farsi-language satellite channels abroad that scrutinize Iran, and since 2015 she has worked as a contractor for the US-funded Voice of America’s Farsi-language network. She fled Iran after the disputed 2009 presidential election and became a US citizen in October 2019.
Alinejad accused the Iranian government of continuing to oppress women in Iran and making them wear the mandatory headscarf or hijab, even two years after the death of Mahsa Amini, which sparked weeks of mass protests.
The fact that the Iranian government has repeatedly tried to kill her, she said, “makes me more determined to give a voice to powerful women in Iran who face the same killers every day.”
