A US woman has been sentenced to 30 years in a British jail after trying to kill a man in Birmingham, England.
Aimee Betro, 45, from Wisconsin, flew to the UK in August 2019 and spent more than two weeks in the country before trying to shoot the man outside his home, West Midlands Police said in a statement Thursday.
Betro was recruited by father and son Mohammed Aslam and Mohammed Nazir to kill the man, who is the son of a man with whom the pair had been embroiled in a feud. Both Aslam and Nazir have also been jailed for their role in the plot.
The intended victim survived the close-range assassination attempt because Betro’s gun jammed. She later returned and fired shots at his house before flying back to the US.
The shooting sparked a major international law enforcement operation, which Betro was able to evade for five years before she was tracked down in Armenia last summer.
In January, she was returned to the UK, where she was charged with conspiracy to murder and possession of a firearm with intent to cause fear of violence.
Betro was also charged with an offence relating to the importation of ammunition into the UK after sending illegal goods from the US to another rival of Nazir’s in an attempt to have him arrested, according to police.
Betro and Nazir had got to know each other online, according to police.
CCTV footage showed Betro bought burner phones, which she used to plot the attack.
She also sent a threatening message to the father of the intended victim of the shooting.
“Stop playing hide n seek. You’re lucky it jammed. Who is it? Your family or you? Pick one,” it read, according to police.
In a separate statement, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) revealed that Betro had “dressed in a niqab to hide her identity when she tried to shoot dead her victim.”
The CPS also said that Nazir was Betro’s “long-distance lover.”
Betro was found guilty after a two-week trial earlier this month and was sentenced to 30 years in jail at Birmingham Crown Court on Thursday.
Detective Chief Inspector Alastair Orencas of the West Midlands Police’s Major Crime Unit said that solving the case had “involved a huge amount of work.”
“It’s by luck that her attempt to kill her target failed, thanks to the jamming of her gun,” said Orencas in the statement.
“While she was passing herself off as a tourist, posting pictures and video of landmarks such as the London Eye while she was here, her real purpose was to commit murder,” he added.
Hannah Sidaway, specialist prosecutor at the CPS, said that Betro had been “relentless in her bid to escape justice” but investigators had pursued her “doggedly.”
“The prosecution case included incriminating CCTV footage from the scene of the crime, digital forensics, mobile phone data and evidence collated from cooperation and collaboration across multiple countries and criminal justice agencies – from West Midlands Police, Derbyshire Constabulary to the Federal Bureau of Investigation – all of which pointed to one culprit,” said Sidaway in the statement.
“Only Betro knows what truly motivated her 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,” she added.
