Woodland Hills woman nabbed at LAX on Iranian arms trafficking charge
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A Woodland Hills woman was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport Saturday night on suspicion of helping Iran funnel weapons to its proxies in Africa, propping up one of the world’s deadliest conflicts.Shamim Mafi, 44, brokered the sale of “drones, bombs, bomb fuses, and millions of rounds of ammunition” between Iran and the Sudanese Armed Forces, according to a criminal complaint filed in Los Angeles federal court just hours before her arrest at the airport, where she’d been set to board a flight to Turkey.
The Sudanese military is locked in a bloody civil war that is estimated to have killed more than 100,000 people and displaced millions more since 2023, making it the deadliest of the ongoing proxy fights among Persian Gulf countries.Mafi is the third Angeleno from the city’s vast Iranian diaspora to be collared by federal authorities in three weeks.
Mafi first emigrated from Iran to Istanbul in 2013 before resettling in Los Angeles, where she ensconced herself in a tony Woodland Hills townhouse in the heart of L.A.’s Iranian community between trips to Iran, Turkey and Oman, court records show.She got her green card in 2016 and quickly began working for Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, using an Omani shell company to move weapons and cash between the government and its proxies, federal authorities allege.
The criminal complaint says Mafi leveraged her contacts within the government to settle a property dispute over an inheritance from her late father and to get her son out of his mandatory military service.In July of 2024, as fighting raged in Khartoum, a Sudanese weapons broker WhatsApped Mafi to contract a shipment of Qods Mohajer-6 drones — the same ones Iran has long supplied Russia in its war in Ukraine, according to the complaint.
At least some of the weapons Mafi sold to the military arrived in Sudan from China.Subsequent ex...