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

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.