Daniel Khalife jailed for spying for Iran and prison escape

Daniel Khalife has been jailed for 14 years and three months after escaping from prison while awaiting trial for spying for Iran.

Khalife joined the Army aged 16, and shortly after began passing sensitive information – including the names of special forces soldiers – to Tehran.

Khalife, now 23, was charged in January 2023 and became the subject of a nationwide manhunt eight months later when he fled Wandsworth prison before his trial. He was arrested in London after a 75-hour search.

Sentencing Khalife on Monday, Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb said he had “the makings of an exemplary soldier” when he joined, but instead showed himself “to be a dangerous fool”.

“You are an attention seeker and you enjoyed the notoriety you attracted following your escape from prison,” the judge added.

Khalife, wearing a black jumper, showed no reaction as he was led from court following the sentencing.

The former soldier, whose actions breached the Official Secrets Act and the Terrorism Act, was found guilty of spying for Iran after a trial at Woolwich Crown Court in November.

Part way through the trial, he pleaded guilty to escaping from prison by strapping himself to the underside of a food delivery truck.

He was cleared of perpetrating a bomb hoax at his army barracks at RAF Stafford in 2023, after three wired cannisters were left at the base where he lived and worked.

Khalife began to foster a relationship with Tehran shortly after he was employed by the British Army as a teenager in September 2018.

He used Facebook to contact a man with links to Iranian intelligence, and from there built a relationship with various contacts from Iran.

By August 2019, having been in the Army for less than a year, he was sent to collect $2,000 (£1,600) in a dog poo bag in Mill Hill Park, north London.

Khalife also travelled to Turkey in August 2020, where he left a package for Iranian intelligence agents.

During his trial, the court heard Khalife had anonymously contacted MI6 twice offering to work as a double agent for them.

Following the calls, police launched an investigation into him in November 2021. He was arrested in January 2022, and charged one year later.

He escaped from Wandsworth prison later in 2023 while awaiting trial, only to be found and arrested after three days.

Prosecutors said Khalife had been “entrusted to uphold and protect the national security of this country”, but had instead “used his employment to undermine” it.

However, Khalife’s lawyer claimed twice during the trial that this plot was “hapless” and more “Scooby-Doo” than “007”.

In her sentencing remarks, Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb said: “What a shame shortly after basic training you spent more than two years in contact with agents of Iran, a country whose interests do not align with UK”.

She added that by the time Khalife had initiated a relationship with Iran, he had been vetted and cleared and thereby had access to a “sea of sensitive material”.

“The duty of confidentiality you owed would have been drilled into you,” she added.

The judge said it was not possible to know the details of all the information Khalife had passed on to his handlers.

The court also heard a number of mitigating factors, including Khalife’s age and a psychological report from 2023 diagnosing him with Antisocial Personality Disorder and Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

During his time in the Army, including while on a military exercise in the US, Khalife accumulated numerous pictures of secret communications equipment on his iPhone – including computer screens showing IP addresses. It is unclear how many of the photos he actually sent to Iran.

Khalife gathered the names of 15 serving soldiers – including some from the special forces.

Initially he only had surnames and initials, but he found a flaw in the Army’s holiday-booking system that allowed him to look up and photograph soldiers’ first names too. These pictures were later found on his phone.

Prosecutors believe he sent the list of names of soldiers to Iran before deleting the evidence.

However, Khalife denied ever sending it and claimed the information he did pass on was “fake” or “useless”. However, he seemingly sent at least two classified documents – one on drones and another on “Intelligence, Surveillance & Reconnaissance”.

The UK will never know the full scale of what Khalife handed over, as most of the messages he exchanged with contacts were sent on the encrypted communication app Telegram.

Speaking after the verdict, Commander Dominic Murphy, the head of the Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command, said: “The threat to the UK from states such as Iran is very serious, so for a soldier in the army to be sharing sensitive military material and information with them is extremely reckless and dangerous.”

After his prison escape, Khalife was arrested by plain-clothes officers while riding a stolen bike on a canal towpath in north-west London – just 11 miles from Wandsworth.

While on the run, he had made an attempt to contact the Iranians, sending a Telegram message which said simply: “I wait.” He received no response.

It was revealed at the sentencing hearing that Khalife’s escape cost police over £250,000 in overtime, with over 150 officers at one point helping with the manhunt.

In his first interview in January 2022, Khalife told police he had an ambition to work in military intelligence or for an elite signals unit.

He said he had been informed by an officer that his ancestry meant he was unlikely to qualify for the high-level security vetting – called “developed vetting” – that would allow him to work in sensitive roles.

“After this I decided to start my own intel operation to prove that I was able to do this,” he wrote in an electronic note in 2021.

Khalife told the jury that he escaped because he was being held on the vulnerable prisoners unit where most inmates are sex offenders, and because he had been warned that “terrorists” in Wandsworth prison would try to attack him.

He said he believed that if he escaped he would be put in the high security unit at Belmarsh prison.

After the escape, an audit found 81 security failings at the prison. It also resulted in “long overdue” upgrades being made to CCTV cameras which had not worked for more than a year, the prison’s Independent Monitoring Board said.

It emerged that on the day of Khalife’s escape, nearly 40% of prison officers did not turn up for their shift at Wandsworth prison. However, the Ministry of Justice insisted the prison had been adequately staffed.

After Monday’s sentencing, security minister Dan Jarvis said the case showed the government “will use the full range of appropriate tools and powers available” to disrupt the activity of “individuals who pose a threat to our national security.”