When Sikander Ali pulled up in the driveway of his family home in a quiet cul-de-sac in the suburbs of the English city of Birmingham, he did not notice a woman in an Islamic veil parked in a dark Mercedes opposite the house.
As he began to open his car door, the veiled woman walked toward him, raised a handgun and pulled the trigger.
Her gun jammed.
Mr. 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,” a local prosecutor, Hannah Sidaway, said.
On Tuesday, Aimee Betro, 45, an American woman from Wisconsin, was convicted in the failed assassination attempt against Mr. 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 Sept. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. Ali’s father or other members of the family, the police said. The assassin they chose was far from local.
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The post The Wisconsin Woman Who Flew to Britain to Kill a Man appeared first on New York Times.
