Iranian Operative Nabbed at LAX Over $70M Sudan Drone Deal

Federal agents arrested 44-year-old Shamim Mafi at Los Angeles International Airport on Saturday night as she tried to board a flight to Turkey. Prosecutors say the Woodland Hills resident spent years brokering Iranian weapons deals, including a $70 million contract for Mohajer-6 armed drones bound for Sudan’s military, as Newsweek reported.

She holds a U.S. green card issued in 2016 and now faces up to 20 years in federal prison on a single sanctions-violation charge.

The Charges and the Shell Company

First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli announced the arrest on X on Sunday. The charge is a violation of 50 U.S.C. § 1705, the statute covering breaches of U.S. sanctions.

A criminal complaint filed March 12 alleges Mafi ran an Oman-based front called Atlas International Business LLC with an unnamed co-conspirator. That company received more than $7 million in 2025 alone. Payments moved through Turkey and the United Arab Emirates to dodge U.S. banking controls.

Investigators say Mafi kept up roughly 62 two-way contacts with an officer from Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security between December 2022 and June 2025. She also coordinated with figures tied to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The Drone at the Center of the Case

The big-ticket drone in the complaint is the Qods Mohajer-6, a medium-altitude armed drone built by Iran’s state-owned Qods Aviation Industries. Court documents describe a contract worth more than $70.6 million for Mohajer-6 aircraft sold to Sudan’s Ministry of Defense. A Sudanese broker reportedly reached Mafi over WhatsApp in July 2024 to start the deal.

The Mohajer-6 is not a peer to Western MALE drones like the MQ-9 Reaper, but it is operationally proven. It carries a max takeoff weight around 1,323 to 1,477 lbs, a wingspan of about 32.8 ft, and a payload capacity of roughly 220 to 331 lbs depending on variant. Top speed is about 124 mph, endurance runs about 12 hours, and its service ceiling sits between 16,000 and 18,000 ft.

The aircraft uses an Austrian-designed Rotax 912 piston engine. Standard weapons include Qaem precision-guided bombs and Almas guided missiles on four underwing hardpoints. Iran has supplied the same platform to Russia for use against Ukraine, and some of the Sudan-bound weapons reportedly transited through China before reaching the battlefield.

Bomb Fuses, Ammo, and a Missed Meeting

The drone deal is only part of the picture. Prosecutors say Mafi and her co-conspirator also brokered 55,000 bomb fuses to Sudan’s Ministry of Defense, 10 million rounds of AK-47 ammunition, and a separate proposed shipment of 240 million additional rounds.

The complaint says Mafi submitted a formal letter of intent to the IRGC to procure the bomb fuses for Sudan. One detail stands out in court filings. When Sudanese officials arrived in Tehran to inspect the fuses, Mafi could not attend because the IRGC facility did not allow women inside. She sent a man in her place.

Money flowed through a mix of channels that investigators call classic sanctions evasion. Some payments arrived in crates of $100 bills, others through hawalas, and still others through banks in Dubai.

Sudan’s War and the Iranian Pipeline

Sudan’s civil war, now in its fourth year, pits the Sudanese Armed Forces against the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. The United Nations calls it the world’s largest displacement crisis. Hundreds of thousands have died and more than 13 million people have been forced from their homes since April 2023.

The Sudanese military has leaned hard on Turkish Bayraktar TB2 and Iranian Mohajer-6 drones in that fight. Iran’s pitch to buyers like Khartoum is simple. No export controls, no political strings, and a proven track record in Ukraine. For Tehran, drone sales have become foreign policy in hardware form.

DroneXL’s Take

Here’s what I find genuinely significant about this case. A green card holder in Woodland Hills, living a luxury-car-and-travel lifestyle on Instagram, was allegedly running a $70 million armed-drone pipeline from Iran’s IRGC to a government carrying out what the UN describes as ethnic cleansing in Darfur.

That is not a small operation. That is a full-service arms brokerage with shell companies in Oman, correspondent accounts in Dubai, and a direct line to Iranian intelligence for years.

The drone industry loves to talk about export controls and ITAR when American companies want to sell overseas. Meanwhile, Iran is shipping Mohajer-6s into active civil wars through a network that operated out of Los Angeles for nearly a decade.

Washington can block a U.S. company from selling a training drone to an allied police department in six months of paperwork, but a single woman with a green card allegedly moved crates of $100 bills and armed reconnaissance aircraft to a sanctioned military before anyone knocked on her door.

The Mohajer-6 is not an impressive drone by Western standards. A Reaper does more than double its endurance and carries vastly better sensors. What the Mohajer-6 offers instead is availability. Iran will sell it to anyone, arm it with Qaem bombs, and ship it through China or the UAE if that is what the buyer needs.

That is the actual threat. It is not the technology. It is the distribution network. And this arrest suggests that network reached deep into American soil.

Mafi is presumed innocent until a jury says otherwise. But if the complaint holds up, the bigger question for U.S. counter-proliferation policy is how many more Atlas International Businesses are still operating right now.

Photo credit: Wikipedia, United States attorney’s office of the Central District Of California