Federal U.S. prosecutors have announced the arrest of an Iranian national and U.S. lawful permanent resident on charges that she ran an illicit arms trafficking network brokering Iranian weapons sales to Sudan’s national military, a scheme that violated sweeping American sanctions imposed on Tehran.
Forty-four-year-old Shamim Mafi was taken into custody by law enforcement officials at Los Angeles International Airport on Saturday, as she prepared to board an outbound flight to Turkey, according to a public statement posted to X by Bill Essayli, First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California. Court documents unsealed following the arrest detail accusations that Mafi coordinated multiple large-scale arms deals directly with Sudan’s Ministry of Defense, moving military hardware produced by Iranian manufacturers into the war-torn Northeast African nation.
The most high-value transaction cited in filings is a $70 million (€60 million / £52 million) contract for unmanned aerial drones, a deal for which Mafi is alleged to have arranged travel for a Sudanese official delegation to Iran, collected more than €6 million in payments from the Sudanese side, issued official payment receipts, and coordinated logistics between Iranian producers and Sudanese military buyers. Court records also add that Mafi formally submitted a letter of intent to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to broker a separate agreement for 55,000 bomb fuses, alongside additional deals for conventional bombs and millions of rounds of small-arms ammunition.
To hide the transactions from U.S. regulators, prosecutors say Mafi deliberately structured deals to bypass oversight, repeatedly using unregulated informal currency exchange entities across multiple transactions in a calculated effort to evade American sanctions that ban any U.S.-based person or resident from engaging in unauthorised commercial activity involving Iranian goods or services. Essayli’s public announcement included accompanying images: one shows a woman believed to be Mafi detained by airport security personnel, while others show a military drone on an airfield tarmac and stacks of bundled cash linked to the alleged scheme.
Mafi, who became a U.S. lawful permanent resident in 2016, has not yet issued any public statement responding to the charges against her. She is scheduled to make her first court appearance for the case on Monday, and if convicted on all counts, she faces a maximum possible prison sentence of 20 years behind bars.
The allegations come against the backdrop of a devastating three-year civil war in Sudan, which has pitted the country’s formal national army against the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The United Nations has labeled the conflict the world’s worst ongoing humanitarian catastrophe, with tens of thousands of civilians and combatants killed, more than 7 million people internally displaced or refuged across neighboring borders, and widespread famine and collapse of basic public services across large swathes of the country.
For months, global human rights watchdogs have documented widespread foreign arms flows to both warring parties, which international observers say have prolonged and intensified the violence. Amnesty International previously published research confirming that weapons manufactured in countries including China, Russia, Serbia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen have been recovered from battlefields in Sudan. Tehran has repeatedly been accused of supplying military support including weapons to Sudan’s army, allegations that Sudanese government officials have repeatedly denied in past statements.