Ex-soldier Daniel Khalife accused of prison escape approached MI6 'wanting to become a double agent’
9 October 2024, 06:22 | Updated: 9 October 2024, 06:54
A British soldier accused of spying for Iran before escaping prison beneath a food truck approached MI6 to become a “double agent”, a court has heard.
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Daniel Khalife, 23, escaped from HMP Wandsworth on September 6 2023, resulting in a “relatively short but intense” nationwide search by the Met.
A former member of the British Army, Khalife was in custody pending a trial after being charged with eliciting or attempting to elicit information likely to be useful to a person preparing an act of terror, placing an explosive and obtaining information useful to an enemy.
Khalife - a British citizen whose father is believed to be Iranian - claimed to have approached Iranian security services, agreeing to provide the Iranian government with information.
The former member of the Royal Signals denies the four charges against him.
On Tuesday, Woolwich Crown Court heard how on one occasion, Khalife had picked up £1,500 from his 'Iranian handlers' in a dog poo bag in a London park.
Khalife claimed his "craft" included the use of fake names and multiple phones to access contacts connected with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).
The contact came in April 2019, just weeks after he passed his security clearance in the British Army.
In August 2019, Khalife is said to have travelled to Mill Hill Park, in Barnet, north London, where pictures on his iPhone revealed he had picked up a dog poo bag adorned with paws and bones, the court heard.
The bag in question was said to contain £1,500.
"The collection of this bag, which had these markings on it, was so that he could receive from his handlers in this country the sum of £1,500," prosecutor Mark Heywood KC told the court.
However, the court heard how Khalife later backtracked on claims he had been recruited by Iran following his arrest, telling police it was a “double bluff” and an attempt to “sell himself” to UK security agencies.
On Tuesday, Woolwich Crown Court heard Khalife had explored ideas linked to espionage since the age of 17.
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The court heard how he had also previously sought out Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard as part of his research.
Opening the case, prosecutor Mark Heywood KC, said the allegations against Khalife involved the “surreptitious gathering and communication with foreign agents of sensitive, sometimes secret information”.
He said that much of the information was "of a kind relevant to the work of the Armed Forces of this country, and so which might well be useful to her enemies”.
“Over a period of more than two years, the defendant collected and made digital records, but also sometimes in paper form, of a large quantity of information of that kind.
“All the while he was a serving soldier in the British Army, employed therefore to uphold and to protect the national security of this country."
He added that Khalife had “made contact with agents of Iran” and “then, on many occasions, he passed information he had gathered to them”.
The case continues.
