Daniel Khalife: Live updates as ex-British Army soldier faces sentencing for HMP Wandsworth escape and spying for Iran

Gul Nawaz Hussain KC, defending, has told the court Khalife’s spy attempts were somewhere between ‘007 and Scooby Doo’.

It was not born of malice, greed, it was not born of religious fervour or ideology.

He described his spying as ‘opportunistic’ saying some of the files he compiled were ‘laughably fake documents.’

The case has cost the CPS in excess of £134,000.

Mr Heywood said the court could consider a deprivation order.

Khalife had stockpiled over £14,000 in cash before he escaped.

During his trial, Khalife told police officers he had received £1,500 from Iranian handlers in a dog waste bag as part of his conduct.

Mark Heywood, KC, prosecuting said the maximum sentence for his offending is 15 years.

He suggested the court should consider the risk that people in very sensitive roles had been identified after Khalife obtained the names of SAS soldiers.

To remind ourselves, Khalife was found guilty of committing an act prejudicial to the safety or interests of the state, and eliciting information about members of the armed forces.

He has also admitted to escaping from Wandsworth prison.

The sentencing hearing at Woolwich Crown Court has now started and Daniel Khalife has been brought into court.

The hearing was delayed as Khalife was stuck in the tunnel between the prison and the court for an hour and 20 mins.

It was not explained how he came to be ‘stuck’ there.

He is now sitting in the dock wearing a dark crew neck jumper and a pair of chinos.

Daniel Khalife’s sentencing is yet to get under way because of a delay.

We will bring you the latest updates when we can from Woolwich Crown Court.

We will bring you live updates from Woolwich Crown Court as soon as today’s sentencing gets under way.

This morning, the prosecution and defence will make their final submissions to the court.

Then the judge will begin his sentencing remarks which are being recorded. We will try to bring you a live stream of his comments when we are able to.

Finally, Khalife will be handed his sentence.

This is the moment Daniel Khalife fled Wandsworth prison by clinging to the underneath of a food delivery van.

Khalife – who had been working in the prison kitchen and was wearing chef’s red and white cheque trousers with a white T-shirt – sneaked under the vehicle, which was delivering food and groceries.

He held on to the underside of the truck with straps, which were found by police after they had stopped the vehicle.

The van was roughly two and a half miles from Wandsworth Prison when it was stopped.

Khalife admitted escaping Wandsworth prison by changing his plea halfway through giving evidence at his trial in November last year.

Initially he denied the charge of escaping from lawful custody but when it was put to him again, he replied: ‘I’m guilty.’

He continued to deny spying for Iran but was found guilty of committing an act prejudicial to the safety or interests of the state, and eliciting information about members of the armed forces.

The 23-year-old was found not guilty of a separate charge of perpetrating a bomb hoax. Speaking after his conviction, Bethan David, from the Crown Prosecution Service, said:

As a serving soldier of the British Army Daniel Khalife was employed and entrusted to uphold and protect the national security of this country. But, for purposes of his own, Daniel Khalife, used his employment to undermine national security.

He surreptitiously sought out and obtained copies of secret and sensitive information which he knew were protected and passed these on to individuals he believed to be acting on behalf of the Iranian state. The sharing of the information could have exposed military personnel to serious harm, or a risk to life, and prejudiced the safety and security of the United Kingdom.

In September 2003, Daniel Khalife sparked a nationwide manhunt across the UK when he escaped Wandsworth prison under a food delivery van.

Khalife was first arrested on 6 January 2022 at a barracks in Stafford where police officers executed a search warrant. He told officers that he had received £1,500 from Iranian handlers in a dog waste bag as part of his conduct.

An examination of his devices found a number of classified documents and chats with individuals he believed to be Iranian. He had also travelled to Turkey in a bid to meet with them.

Khalife was bailed and returned to his barracks before absconding on 2 January 2023. Khalife was found and arrested some three weeks later before being remanded into custody.

On 6 September 2023 he managed to escape from Wandsworth Prison while on kitchen duty by using a makeshift cloth under a food delivery lorry. He was caught three days later on the footpath of the Grand Union Canal in Northolt, west London, after a nationwide manhunt.

Here’s the graphic that appeared in the Daily Mail newspaper on September 10 – the day after Khalife was arrested.

During his trial Daniel Khalife candidly told jurors, ‘I was thinking I could be James Bond.’

The trouble was that whenever the young soldier contacted MI6 offering his services, no one ever called back.

And so the 23-year-old embarked on an extraordinary spy mission of his own making.

For over two years he flogged Iran secrets, including the names of SAS soldiers, snatched pictures of military encryption systems and other classified material in return for payments of £1,500 left by his mysterious handlers in dog poo bags at various London parks.

In a scheme that even his lawyer called ‘harebrained’, the self-described narcissist inflated his own importance by fabricating documents from MI6 chief Sir Richard Moore, sensitive nuclear plans and he even faked a briefing about negotiations over the release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe which could have endangered her life.

Police described Khalife as the ‘ultimate Walter Mitty character that was having a significant impact on the real world’.

He joined the Army in 2018, two weeks before his 17th birthday, and served with the Royal Corps of Signals.

In 2021, Khalife secretly gathered the names of serving soldiers, including those in the special forces.

He took a photo of a handwritten list of 15 of them, having been sent an internal spreadsheet of promotions in June 2021. Prosecutors believed he sent the list to Iran before deleting any evidence.

After his arrest, he told police he had wanted to offer himself to UK security agencies all along, having emailed MI6 as early as 2019.

Khalife told jurors he wanted to prove bosses wrong after being told his Iranian heritage could stop him working in military intelligence, and came up with his elaborate double agent plot after watching the TV spy thriller Homeland.

In November 2021, he made an anonymous call to the MI5 public reporting line, confessing to having been in contact with Iran for more than two years.

He offered to help the British security services, and said he wanted to return to his normal life.

Hello and welcome to MailOnline’s live coverage as former soldier Daniel Khalife faces sentencing for spying for Iran and escaping from Wandsworth prison.

Khalife, 23, was serving in the British Army when he ‘exposed military personnel to serious harm’ by collecting sensitive information and passing it to agents of the Middle Eastern country.

He was paid in cash for the secret information and told handlers he would stay in the military for 25-plus years for them.

In September 2023, Khalife escaped from category B prison HMP Wandsworth, in south-west London, by clinging to the underside of a food delivery truck.

He was caught on a canal towpath by a plainclothes detective days later.

Stick with us for live updates from his sentencing hearing with reporting from the Daily Mail’s Crime and Security Editor Rebecca Camber at Woolwich Crown Court and Jamie Bullen in London.