BERLIN — In the middle of a Berlin hotel cafe, Masih Alinejad raises her voice and begins to sing at the top of her lungs in Farsi as the waiters turn to watch along with the three German government bodyguards assigned to protect her.

“I blossom through my wounds and scars,” she translates the lyrics as. “Because I’m a woman. I am a woman. I’m a woman.”

Alinejad expressed her defiance and asserted her right to free speech following news of Iranian assassination plots to kill her and Donald Trump that were revealed by the US Department of Justice. She said some Iranian women have been jailed for singing.

The Iranian-American human rights activist, who was in Berlin on Saturday to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall with other human rights activists from around the world, said in an interview with The Associated Press that , despite the shock of the news, she felt more determined than ever to continue fighting for women’s rights in Iran.

“They want to get rid of me. When they want me dead, it means they’re doing something. They hurt them so much,” said Alinejad, 48, referring to the Iranian government. “I echo the voice of strong women and that scares them.”

She raised her hand in a defiant fist repeatedly during the interview.

On Friday, the US Justice Department said it was charging a man who said he was instructed by a government official before this week’s election to plan to assassinate Trump.

Investigators were tipped off about the plan by Farhad Shakeri, an indicted Iranian government asset who has served time in US prisons for robbery and who authorities say maintains a network of criminal associates enlisted by Tehran for surveillance and murder plots.

Shakeri is at large and remains in Iran. Two other men — identified as Jonathan Loadholt and Carlisle Rivera by the U.S. Department of Justice — were arrested on charges that the Shakers recruited them to hunt down and kill Alinejad, who suffered multiple Iranian murder plots on his own, foiled by law enforcement.

The Justice Department claims the two men spent months surveilling her and, during their efforts to locate and kill her, shared messages about their progress and photos.

Around February, they traveled to Fairfield University in Connecticut, where Alinejad was scheduled to appear, and took photos of the campus.

Around April, the Shakers sent Rivera a series of voice memos discussing their efforts to locate and kill her, the Justice Department said in a statement Friday.

In a voice memo, Shakeri told Rivera that “you have to wait and be patient to catch her either going into the house, going out, or following her somewhere and taking care of it,” the statement said.

“It’s scary. But at the same time, I was very pleased that US law enforcement was protecting me,” Alinejad said, recounting her call with US security officials.

“The same person who was trying to kill President Trump was tasked with killing me. I mean, that’s a badge of honor,” she added.

In Tehran, Esmail Baghaei, a spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, dismissed the report and called it a plot by Israeli-linked circles to complicate Iran-US relations, the official IRNA news agency reported.

Alinejad is a prominent figure on Farsi-language satellite channels abroad critical of Iran and has worked as a contractor for the US-funded Voice of America Farsi-language network since 2015. She fled Iran following disputed presidential elections since 2009 and became a US citizen in October 2019.

Alinejad accused the Iranian government of continuing to oppress women in Iran and make them wear the headscarf, or hijab, even two years after the death of Mahsa Amini, which sparked weeks of mass protests.

The fact that the Iranian government has repeatedly tried to kill her, she said, “makes me more determined to give a voice to the strong women of Iran who face the same killers every day.”