The Wisconsin woman hired to kill in Birmingham, UK

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.

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.

But instead of firing, the weapon jammed – saving the man’s life.

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.

It started, however, the year before the botched shooting in 2019, at a clothes shop in Birmingham’s Alum Rock.

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.

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”.

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.

“[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.”

Betro, 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.

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.

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.

This included an incident three days before the attempted murder when footage found on Nazir’s phone showed a gun being fired and jamming.

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.

Later that day, she was seen “driving in convoy” with Nazir and Aslam “scoping out” Measham Grove, where Mr Mahumad lived.

She then waited in the cul-de-sac for her victim and disguised herself with a niqab, jurors heard.

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.

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.

“It was absolute pure chance this didn’t culminate in a murder investigation,” he said.

Betro initially fled the scene but returned by taxi just after midnight and fired three shots at the family home.

By 13:30 BST, she was at Manchester Airport and flew to the US, prosecutors said.

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.

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.

The investigation to find Betro and 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.

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.

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.

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.

Jurors found her guilty of conspiracy to murder by majority verdict after almost 21 hours of deliberation.

Det Ch Insp Orencas described Betro as someone who was “extremely dangerous and extremely motivated to cause the worst harm to people”.

Nor was her involvement “off-the-cuff… madness” but pre-planned with others across continents, he added.

“I think [she] has had a somewhat problematic relationship with the truth in not accepting what she was accused of.”

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.

“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.”

Aslam, 56, and Nazir, 31, were jailed for conspiracy to murder in November 2024.

Betro will be sentenced on 21 August.