Wisconsin hitwoman Aimee Betro found guilty of UK murder plot

A “fairly unexceptional” Wisconsin woman was convicted of attempted murder Tuesday after she was shockingly hired to kill a British storeowner — and failed only because her gun jammed.

Aimee Betro, 45, of West Allis, WI, was part of a slay plot targeting Sikander Ali outside his home in Birmingham, England, on Sept. 7, 2019, UK authorities said.

The planned hit was triggered by a fight at a Birmingham clothing boutique owned by Ali’s father, Aslat Mahumad, in July 2018 which left two men — Mohammed Aslam, 56, and his son Mohammed Nabil Nazir, 31 — injured, a jury was told.

Betro had previously met Nazir on a dating app.

“[Betro was] a fairly unexceptional individual. On the face of it, a normal-looking individual, prepared to do an outrageous, audacious and persistent murder,” said Detective Chief Inspector Alastair Orencas from West Midlands Police’s major crime unit to BBC News.

Dramatic security footage from the shooting scene showed Betro, who had almost no previous “criminal footprint,” approaching Ali’s car and firing her gun at him at point-blank range, prosecutors said. Betro allegedly hid her identity at the time using a headscarf.

But her gun jammed, allowing Ali to flee, prosecutors said.

Betro later allegedly goaded Ali’s father Mahumad by text.

“Where are you hiding?” she texted the dad. “Stop playing hide and seek, you are lucky it jammed.”

Hours later, Betro took a taxi to Ali’s home and fired three gunshots at the property, which was empty at the time, before flying home to the US the next day.

Betro had allegedly traveled to the UK on two previous occasions after meeting Nazir on an app.

Calling her crimes “brazen,” Orencas said there didn’t “seem to be a whole lot of effort to avoid detection.”

In October 2019, just weeks after the bizarre failed murder bid, Betro took part in another of Nazir’s revenge plots on a rival, authorities said.

She mailed three parcels of ammunition and gun parts to the UK, addressed to a man in the central English city of Derby, with the plan being that Nazir would tip off police and frame him for the crime, they said.

The innocent man was arrested but later released without charge after Nazir’s “devious scheme” came to light, prosecutors said.

Betro’s DNA was found on the gun parts and ammo inside the box, and she was seen in security footage at a post office 100 miles from her home sending the parcels under a fake name, the jury was told.

She tried to claim that the woman in the footage wasn’t her, but just someone who dressed, looked and sounded like her.

Nazir and Aslam were jailed for 32 years and 10 years respectively in November for their role in the planned hit, while Betro was extradited from Armenia, where she was living, in January to face trial in the UK.

Wearing a purple t-shirt and with her hair in space buns, Betro appeared emotionless as she was convicted Tuesday of conspiracy to murder, possessing a self-loading pistol with intent to cause fear of violence, and illegally importing ammunition.

She was remanded in custody and is due to be sentenced Aug. 21.