Arms smuggler sentenced to 40 years in prison after shipping ballistic missiles from Iran

An arms smuggler who used a fishing boat to ship ballistic missile parts from Iran to Yemen’s Houthi rebels has been sentenced to 40 years in prison in the US.

Pakistani national Muhammad Pahlavan was detained during a US military operation in the Arabian Sea in January 2024 – during which two US Navy SEALs drowned.

The Pahlawan crew testified that they were tricked into participating because they believed they were working as fishermen.

At the time, the Houthis launched sustained missile and drone attacks against Israel and targeted international commercial shipping in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, saying they were acting in support of Gazans. Iran has consistently denied arming the Houthis.

The crew’s detailed testimony in court in the US state of Virginia provides a rare inside look at the smuggling operation that helped carry out the attacks.

The components found on Pahlavan’s boat were “some of the most sophisticated weapons systems that Iran distributes to other terrorist groups,” US federal prosecutors said after his trial.

The 49-year-old was sentenced on Thursday, having previously been convicted of five charges – including terrorist offenses and transporting weapons of mass destruction.

Court documents show the sentences on two of the five charges will run concurrently for 240 months, or 20 years. The other three numbers, another 20 years, will run consecutively after this – making a total of 480 months or 40 years.

The eight crew members who testified in court said they had no idea what was inside the large packages aboard the boat, named Yunus.

One crew member said that when he questioned Pahlavan about it, he was told to mind his own business.

However, Pahlavan knew how dangerous the cargo was.

He referred to himself as “the walking dead” in text messages he exchanged with his wife in the days leading up to the January 2024 trip that would get him arrested.

“Pray (we) come back alive,” said the message, used as evidence in court.

“Why are you saying ‘he might not come back,'” she asked him.

Pahlavan said to her, “Such is the nature of the work, my dear, such is the nature of the work.”

His last words to her before he sailed away were, “Keep me in your prayers. May God get me there safely and bring me back safely, all right. Pray.”

For that trip, Pahlavan received 1,400 million riyals (£25,200; $33,274) – a substantial fee that prosecutors at his trial described as “danger money”.

The trip was “part of a larger operation” funded and coordinated by two Iranian brothers, Yunus and Shahab Mir’kazei, the then-US Department of Defense (now known as the War Department) said in a statement in June.

The Mir’kazei brothers are said to be linked, it added, to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran’s most powerful armed force. The IRGC has been designated by the US as a foreign terrorist organization.

Both Shahab and Yunus Mirkazei have been charged by US authorities but are still at large and believed to be in Iran.

Pahlavan made two successful smuggling trips before he was caught – one in October 2023 and a second two months later.

The dozen men he recruited to join him were all from Pakistan and had traveled across the border into Iran in search of work.

Before setting off on the trip in December, the US court heard, the crew was tasked with loading large packages onto the boat in Chabahar on Iran’s southern coast.

Then, after five or six days at sea, when they were near the coast of Somalia, the crew described how another boat pulled up to them during the night and they had to hand over the cargo.

Crew member Mehandi Hassan told the court there were about five men on the other boat who spoke in a language he did not recognise.

Their next trip, next month, was expected to follow the same route. As before, it starts in the small port of Konarak before sailing to Chabahar, where the crew must load heavy boxes on board.

The packages, the US Navy would later discover, contained parts of Iranian-made ballistic missiles, components for anti-ship cruise missiles and a warhead.

Once at sea, Pahlavan kept to himself, according to crew testimony, often staying in his cabin and watching movies on his phone. Sometimes they would see Pahlavan on a second cellphone — a satellite phone — but they didn’t know what he was saying, Mehandi Hassan said, because he was speaking in a language they didn’t understand.

On January 11, the crew said they were awakened by the sound of helicopter rotors overhead and a US Navy ship pulling alongside. Pahlavan came out of his cabin to tell everyone to “keep going” and not stop the boat, telling them that the ship and helicopters belonged to pirates.

Armed U.S. SEALs and Coast Guard officers attempted to board the Yunus. “There was a lot of commotion,” one of the crew, Aslam Hyder, told the court.

Special Warrant Officer Christopher Chambers lost his grip and fell into the water during the operation — and Special Warrant Officer 1st Class Nathan Gage Ingram jumped in to try to save him.

Both men were so loaded with equipment that they quickly drowned, an internal report later found. Their bodies were never found and they were pronounced dead 10 days later.

The crew stayed on the Yunus for two days before being offloaded onto a US Navy ship, the court heard, where they were split into two groups and kept in windowless containers.

Pahlavan ordered the crew to lie and say that the captain had already escaped. “He said, ‘Don’t tell them I’m (the captain) because I can seriously harm you if you do,'” Aslam Haider told the court.

“He started threatening us … It was about the family and the kids, that they wouldn’t know about you and you wouldn’t know what happened to them,” he said. “Then we were very frightened and kept silent.

One by one, testified crew members said, they were removed from the containers to be questioned individually. Everyone on board — including Pahlavan — was asked who the captain was, and according to U.S. prosecutors, Pahlavan “just got out, lied and hid.”

The U.S. military said the packages found aboard the Yunus were the first Iranian-supplied weapons seized by U.S. forces since the Houthis began attacking ships in the Red Sea several months earlier.

But Pahlavan followed a common route for smugglers transporting weapons to Yemen.

Between 2015 and 2023, US and allied forces seized almost 2.4 million rounds of ammunition, 365 anti-tank guided missiles and more than 29,000 small arms and light weapons from small boats in the Arabian Sea, according to a UN report.

Smugglers typically use a dhow – a type of small boat, often used for fishing – to transport cargo near the coast of Somalia.

As with Yunus, it is here that the weapons are transferred to other, smaller boats, which then sail to “secluded beaches off Yemen’s southern coast … where they are then smuggled across the desert to Houthi-controlled areas of the country,” the UN Office on Drugs and Crime report said.

William Freer, of the British think tank the Geostrategy Council, told BBC News that while most of the Houthi attacks involved smaller weapons, the components found on Pahlavan’s ship were “much more sophisticated and can pack a lot more punch”.

“Very quickly most shipping companies decided to divert all their ships where possible around South Africa rather than going through the Red Sea.”

This extended diversion adds about 10 to 12 days of sailing time to each voyage and additional fuel which previous analysis it is estimated to cost companies around $1 million extra (£748,735) per round trip.

Mr Freer added that the impact on merchant shipping continues to this day.

“Within about two months after the initial attacks (in October 2023), shipping transiting the Red Sea dropped by about 60% to 70% and has remained at that level ever since, even with the ceasefire,” he told us.

Although Houthi strikes are now less frequent, he added, there are still “enough attacks to convince shipping companies that it’s not worth the risk of going back” to the Red Sea route.

Iran has been accused by the US, UK, Israel and Saudi Arabia of smuggling missiles and other weapons to the Houthis by sea, in violation of a UN Security Council resolution, since the armed group ousted Yemen’s internationally recognized government from much of northwestern Yemen 10 years ago, sparking a devastating civil war. Iran denies this.

On June 5 of this year, Pahlavan was found guilty of conspiracy to provide material support and resources to terrorists; providing material support to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ weapons of mass destruction program; plotting and transporting explosive devices to the Houthis, knowing that those explosives would be used to cause harm; and threatens his crew.

“Pahlavan was not only a skilled smuggler,” prosecutors said, “he knew what he was smuggling and what it was for.”

In the latest plea to the court for leniency, Pahlavan’s lawyer wrote that Pahlavan’s wife’s life had long been estranged from her family because of her marriage to him, and that since his arrest, life for her and her child had become “extremely difficult and harsh.”

“Since the jury’s verdict, Mr. Pahlavan’s sole focus in their phone calls has been the well-being of his family,” his attorney said. “He doesn’t talk about himself and his fate. He cries because he’s worried about what will happen to his wife and child.”

But the court ruled that his high sentence was “appropriate because of the nature and circumstances of the crime and the history and characteristics of the defendant.”