Ex-soldier accused of spying for Iran ‘gathered names of special forces’

October 9

A former British solider accused of passing secret information to Iran gathered the names of service personnel, including those in special forces, a court has heard.

Daniel Khalife, 23, is separately accused of escaping from Wandsworth Prison last year by strapping himself to the underside of a food delivery truck.

He has gone on trial on charges of collecting sensitive military information for Iran. He denies all the charges.

Mr Khalife also offered to work for the Iranians for more than 25 years, Woolwich Crown Court was told on Wednesday.

Mr Khalife took a photo of a handwritten list of 15 soldiers, including some serving in the Special Air Service (SAS) and Special Boat Service (SBS), the prosecution said.

He took details from an internal spreadsheet of promotions in June 2021, sent to a WhatsApp group called Brew Room Boys, and then logged on to an internal HR system to find out the soldiers’ first names, jurors heard.

Mark Heywood KC for the prosecution said: “He was clearly researching and gathering and recording that information.”

Mr Khalife, who was brought up in Kingston, south-west London by his Iranian-born mother, joined the Army in September 2018, two weeks before his 17th birthday.

In April 2019, he created a contact with the +98 dialling code for Iran, the court has heard.

By August 2020, the prosecution said that Mr Khalife was messaging a man saved in his phone as “David Smith”, describing an internal military system which would identify service personnel.

He told the contact: “I won’t leave the military until you tell me to”, before adding: “25+ years.”

The prosecution alleged Mr Khalife travelled to Istanbul in August 2020 with the intention of travelling onto Iran for a meeting, but in the end he just remained in the Hilton Istanbul Bomonti Hotel.

Afterwards in an audio message to ‘David Smith’ he said: “We were supposed meet actually in your country… We went to Turkey and the plan kind of went sour, they didn’t plan it correctly.”

At one point in early 2021, Mr Khalife was posted to Fort Hood in Texas in the United States, and the prosecution said he was still in contact with one of his Iranian handlers while he was there.

It was here where he took a series of screenshots of systems marked “secret”, including a password record sheet.

In April that year Mr Khalife was granted the second highest level of Nato security, one below “cosmic top secret”.

Mr Khalife is alleged to have escaped from HMP Wandsworth in south London while on remand on terror and espionage charges by strapping himself to the underside of a food delivery lorry on 6 September 2023.

He was arrested on a canal towpath in west London three days later.

The trial, expected to last about six weeks, continues.

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