The Justice of the United Kingdom has sentenced to 14 years and three months in prison to the former military Daniel Khalife, accused of working as a spy at the service of Iran and who came to escape a London prison in September 2023, for violating the law of official secrets and terrorism.
A Court of the United Kingdom determined in November 2024 that Khalife was guilty of violating both laws, although it has not been until Monday when the “long” sentence that the judge of the case has already advanced, Bobbie Cheema-Grubb.
Khalife was arrested after offering British security services as a double agent and claiming to have cultivated a good relationship with Iran. There it was discovered that he would have benefited from his position in the Armed Forces to collect secret information for Tehran.
The authorities have determined that Khalife shared secret information with his Iranian contact, although it has not been possible to determine the number of documents he revealed. During the trial, the defendant said that he never sent revealing documents, and that in most cases it was false information.
Judge Cheema-Grubb has asserted that the ex-military embarked alone in this conflict because of his “selfish desire to show off, to achieve by unregulated means what they told him that it would be difficult to achieve through a conventional promotion.” In addition, he has accused him of “immaturity and lack of intelligence.”
“That he has thought that he was passionate to insert yourself, a young unauthorized, not qualified and uninformed soldier, in communication with an enemy state is perhaps the clearest indication of the degree of folly of his inability to understand the most obvious level of risk he represented,” said the magistrate.
Khalife starred in September 2023 a spectacular escape from the Wandsworth prison, where he was arrested preventively waiting for trial. The ex -military camouflaged in the bass of a food cast truck to escape the jail and was not up to three days after he was arrested again.
During the trial, Khalife defined himself as a “British” patriot and “not a terrorism or a traitor”, while justifying his performances by stating that “he thought it could be James Bond.” The Prosecutor’s Office determined that his action “exposed military personnel to serious damage.”
His prison escape unleashed a wave of criticism not only to the British government-then headed by Rishi Sunak-but also the penitentiary system. During the trial of last November, Khalife admitted to having escaped from legal custody in the midst of his judicial process and was convicted of having violated the law of official secrets and terrorism.
