Aimee Betro was convicted of attempting to assassinate Sikander Ali in Birmingham, England. Photo / Getty Images
When Sikander Ali pulled up in the driveway of his family home in a quiet cul-de-sac in the suburbs of Birmingham, England, he did not notice a woman with her face covered, parked in a dark Mercedes opposite the house.
As he began to open his car door, the veiled woman walked towards him, raised a handgun and pulled the trigger.
Her gun jammed.
Ali scrambled back into his vehicle, threw it into reverse and sped off, security footage from a nearby house showed.
“It is sheer luck that he managed to get away unscathed,” said a local prosecutor, Hannah Sidaway.
Today, Aimee Betro, 45, an American woman from Wisconsin, was convicted in the failed assassination attempt against Ali.
A jury in a court in Birmingham found her guilty of conspiracy to murder, firearm possession, and importing ammunition after a three-week trial.
Prosecutors say the botched attack, on September 7, 2019, was the culmination of a feud between two families in England’s Midlands region that had started the previous year with a fistfight in a Birmingham clothing store owned by Ali’s father.
In that episode, Mohammed Aslam, 56, and his son Mohammed Nazir, 31, were injured.
In the aftermath, they decided to exact revenge through a murder plot targeting Ali’s father or other members of the family, the police said. The assassin they chose was far from local.
Betro, who is from the city of West Allis, about 10km outside Milwaukee, had struck up an online relationship with Nazir and previously had visited him in 2018.
Nazir and his father were sentenced for their part in the plot last November, with Aslam receiving a 10-year prison sentence and Nazir 32 years for offences including conspiracy to murder.
By then, investigators had already identified Betro as the shooter and had launched an international search.
Security camera footage and data from the three plotters’ mobile phones showed that Betro had arrived in Britain on a flight that landed at Manchester Airport on August 22, 2019.
Alastair Orencas, a detective from West Midlands Police, said Betro initially passed herself off as a tourist, “posting pictures and video of landmarks such as the London Eye”.
But the whole time, he said, “her real purpose was to commit murder”.
Preparations intensified on September 4, 2019, when Betro met Nazir in his hometown, Derby, 65km north of the Ali family’s house.
A video recorded on Nazir’s mobile phone showed a gun being test-fired in a wasteland near a main road.
The weapon jammed during filming, prosecutors said, just as it would in the assassination attempt three days later.
On the morning of September 7, 2019, Betro left her hotel wearing a summer dress and went to purchase a second-hand Mercedes E240 that would become her getaway vehicle, using a false name, “Becky Booth”.
Later that day, the car was recorded by closed-circuit security cameras driving repeatedly past the victim’s home in a convoy with Nazir’s red Volvo.
As darkness started to fall, Betro’s co-conspirators left. She parked the Mercedes and covered her face with a niqab, a type of Islamic veil. Then she lay in wait until Ali arrived home at 8.10pm.
After her failed first attempt, Betro drove away, later abandoning the Mercedes and changing her clothes, prosecutors said. She returned to Ali’s house in a taxi shortly after midnight.
She ordered the cab to wait some distance from the house. Then she opened fire on Ali’s home, sending three bullets flying through its front windows, into the living room and an upstairs bedroom. Nobody was hit.
After Betro returned to the taxi, she sent Ali’s father taunting messages. “Where are you hiding,” she wrote, and, “Stop playing hide ‘n’ seek you’re lucky it jammed.”
Betro left Britain hours after the shooting, and Nazir joined her in the United States three days later.
Prosecutors said that the pair then attempted to frame another man for attempted assassination, mailing him ammunition and gun components from Illinois under a false name and tipping off the British police.
Nazir was arrested when he returned to Britain on October 13, 2019. Betro remained on the run for five years.
She was tracked down in Armenia last summer and extradited to England. She will be sentenced on August 21.
Sidaway, the prosecutor, said the conviction was the “culmination of years of hard work doggedly pursuing Betro across countries and borders”.
No payments to Betro were ever found, and the reason for her agreeing to carry out the hit – which she denied any involvement in – remains a mystery.
“Only she knows what truly motivated her,” Sidaway said, “or what she sought to gain from becoming embroiled in a crime that meant she travelled hundreds of miles from Wisconsin to Birmingham, to execute an attack on a man she did not know”.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Lizzie Dearden
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