In the middle of a hotel cafe in Berlin, Masih Alinejad, whose waiters turn to watch him along with the three German government bodyguards assigned to protect him, raises his voice and begins singing in Persian at the top of his lungs.

He translates the lyrics as “I bloom with my wounds and scars.” “Because I am a woman. I am a woman. “I am a woman.”

Alinejad was expressing his defiance and defending his right to express himself following reports released by the US Department of Justice that Iran was plotting murder-for-hire to kill him and Donald Trump. He said some Iranian women were imprisoned for singing.

The Iranian-American human rights activist, who was in Berlin on Saturday to mark the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall with other human rights activists from around the world, said in an interview with The Associated Press that despite the shock of the news: Women in Iran He felt more determined than ever to continue fighting for his rights.

“They want to get rid of me. When they want me dead, it means I did something. I hurt them very badly,” said Alinejad, 48, referring to the Iranian government. “I echo the voices of strong women and that scares them.”

He repeatedly raised his hand in a defiant fist during the interview.

The U.S. Justice Department on Friday said a man who said he was tasked with plotting Trump’s assassination by a government official before this week’s election has been charged.

Investigators were told of the plan by Farhad Shakeri, an Iranian government official who spent time in American prisons for robbery and who authorities believe maintained a network of accomplices recruited by Tehran for surveillance and murder-for-hire conspiracies.

Shakeri is free and remains in Iran. Two other men, identified by the U.S. Department of Justice as Jonathan Loadholt and Carlisle Rivera, were arrested on charges that Shakeri assigned them to track and kill Alinejad, who was involved in multiple murder-for-hire plots that were thwarted by Iran’s law enforcement agencies.

The Justice Department alleges the two men spied on him for months and exchanged messages about their progress and photos during their efforts to find and kill him.

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

Around April, Shakeri sent Rivera a series of voice notes discussing efforts to find and kill him, the Justice Department said Friday.

In the statement, Shakeri told Rivera in a voice memo that “you have to wait and be patient to catch him coming in or out of the house or follow him somewhere and take care of it.”

“Scary. “But at the same time, I was very pleased that the US law enforcement officers protected me,” said Alinejad, describing his meeting with American security officials.

“The same person who tried to kill President Trump was assigned to kill me. “I mean, it’s a badge of honor,” he added.

In Tehran, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei rejected the report and said it was a conspiracy by Israel-linked circles to further complicate Iran-US relations, the official IRNA news agency reported.

Alinejad is a prominent figure on Persian-language satellite channels abroad that are critical of Iran, and has worked as a contractor for the US-funded Voice of America’s Persian-language broadcast network since 2015. He fled Iran following the country’s 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 impose mandatory hijab or headscarf on them even two years after Mahsa Amini’s death, 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 speak out for the strong women in Iran who face the same killers every day.”