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Police handout<\/p>\nCaroline Gall<\/p>\n
BBC News, West Midlands<\/p>\n
Police handout<\/p>\n
US citizen Aimee Betro had virtually no “criminal footprint” before the shooting in Birmingham, UK, police say<\/p>\n
US woman Aimee Betro has been found guilty of attempting to shoot a man dead in the UK. But the investigation into the Wisconsin native revealed her to be “fairly unexceptional” with virtually no “criminal footprint”. And it remains unclear why she became a would-be contract killer.<\/b><\/p>\n
On an autumn night six years ago, Betro pointed a 9mm gun at Sikander Ali in a suburban cul-de-sac and pulled the trigger, as she had been hired to do.<\/p>\n
But instead of firing, the weapon jammed – saving the man’s life.<\/p>\n
It marked the mid-point of a plot more suited to a television drama, and one that eventually ended several years later and thousands of miles away with Betro’s capture in Armenia.<\/p>\n
It started, however, the year before the botched shooting in 2019, at a clothes shop in Birmingham’s Alum Rock.<\/p>\n
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Police handout<\/p>\n
Betro, pictured in a shop in Birmingham, was extradited to the UK from Armenia earlier this year<\/p>\n
In 2018, Mohammed Aslam and his son Mohammed Nabil Nazir were injured during a fight at a shop owned by Mr Ali’s father, Aslat Mahumad.<\/p>\n
The clash sparked a violent feud between the families, Birmingham Crown Court heard, which “clearly led Nazir and Aslam to conspire to have someone kill Aslat Mahumad or a member of his family”.<\/p>\n
The pair, from Derby, turned to Betro – a woman not known by police “to have a huge footprint criminally” in the US or anywhere, according to Det Ch Insp Alastair Orencas from West Midlands Police’s major crime unit.<\/p>\n
“[She was] a fairly unexceptional individual,” he said. “On the face of it, a normal-looking individual [but] prepared to do an outrageous, audacious and persistent murder.”<\/p>\n
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Police handout<\/p>\n
Betro was captured firing directly at the family home in Measham Grove<\/p>\n
Betro, <\/b>a childhood development and graphic design graduate from the US city of West Allis, arrived in the UK in August 2019 to carry out Aslam and Nazir’s vendetta.<\/p>\n
The court heard she had previously met Nazir via a dating app and slept with him at an Airbnb in London’s Kings Cross during a visit to the UK between December 2018 and January 2019, although it remains unclear how she came to be hired to carry out the shooting.<\/p>\n
Prior to the attack on 7 September, she stayed at hotels in London, Manchester, Derby and Birmingham and met her co-conspirators at various points, jurors heard.<\/p>\n
This included an incident three days before the attempted murder when footage found on Nazir’s phone showed a gun being fired and jamming.<\/p>\n
Scoping out house<\/p>\n
On the day of the shooting, Betro – wearing a summer dress, hoodie and flip-flops – bought a second-hand Mercedes from a garage in Alum Rock under the name Becky Booth.<\/p>\n
Later that day, she was seen “driving in convoy” with Nazir and Aslam “scoping out” Measham Grove, where Mr Mahumad lived.<\/p>\n
She then waited in the cul-de-sac for her victim and disguised herself with a niqab, jurors heard.<\/p>\n
When Mr Ali pulled up, she got out and fired the gun directly at him but it did not discharge, prompting him to jump back in his car and flee.<\/p>\n
The distance between the firearm and Mr Ali meant there would have been little-to-no chance of survival had it gone off, according to Det Ch Insp Orencas.<\/p>\n
“It was absolute pure chance this didn’t culminate in a murder investigation,” he said.<\/p>\n
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West Midlands Police<\/p>\n
Bullets went through the windows of the house<\/p>\n
Betro initially fled the scene but returned by taxi just after midnight and fired three shots at the family home.<\/p>\n
By 13:30 BST, she was at Manchester Airport and flew to the US, prosecutors said.<\/p>\n
Days later, Nazir followed and according to Betro, the pair rented a car and drove to Seattle “just for a road trip” with stops at an amusement park, Area 51 in Nevada, Los Angeles and San Francisco.<\/p>\n
She told jurors she did not know there had been a shooting in Measham Grove and Nazir had not mentioned it during his time in the States.<\/p>\n
The investigation to find Betro and <\/b>bring her co-conspirators to justice not only spanned several years but was hampered by the pandemic and involved the FBI, National Crime Agency and two UK police forces.<\/p>\n
Eventually, she was traced to a housing complex on the outskirts of Yerevan in Armenia and apprehended by police before she was extradited to the UK.<\/p>\n
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West Midlands Police<\/p>\n
Mohammed Aslam (left) and his son Mohammed Nazir were jailed in November<\/p>\n
From the start, Betro denied her involvement and told the trial it was “all just a terrible coincidence” that she was around the corner from the scene of the attempted assassination six minutes later.<\/p>\n
She claimed it was in fact the work of “another American woman” who sounded similar to her, used the same phone and wore the same sort of trainers.<\/p>\n
Jurors found her guilty of conspiracy to murder by majority verdict after almost 21 hours of deliberation.<\/p>\n
Det Ch Insp Orencas described Betro as someone who was “extremely dangerous and extremely motivated to cause the worst harm to people”.<\/p>\n
Nor was her involvement “off-the-cuff… madness” but pre-planned with others across continents, he added.<\/p>\n
“I think [she] has had a somewhat problematic relationship with the truth in not accepting what she was accused of.”<\/p>\n
Asked if he believed Betro was paid or had acted out of loyalty to her partner Nazir, the officer said: “We’ve not seen evidence of payments.<\/p>\n
“They met on a dating site, whether this is a partner doing something for another partner, again, there’s no clear evidence of that. I see it as a criminal association and a murderous plot.”<\/p>\n