Ex-Staffordshire soldier Daniel Khalife to be sentenced for spying and prison escape

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.

Prosecutors in his trial said Khalife played “a cynical game”, claiming he wanted a career as a double agent to help the British intelligence services, when in fact he gathered “a very large body of restricted and classified material”.

In November, jurors at Woolwich Crown Court found that Khalife had breached the Official Secrets Act and the Terrorism Act.

He was cleared of carrying out a bomb hoax and had already admitted during his trial to escaping from Wandsworth prison.

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.

Defending Khalife during his trial, Gul Nawaz Hussain KC said the double agent plot was “hapless” and “sometimes bordering on the slapstick”, more Scooby-Doo than James Bond or Homeland.

Prosecutors said Khalife prepared a bomb hoax at his Staffordshire barracks in January 2023, but the trial heard how a soldier who arrived in the room pulled wires out of the device to prove it was not real.

A bomb disposal unit was called after police attended and looked at the device several days later.

Khalife is due to be sentenced at Woolwich Crown Court on Monday.