A former British soldier who escaped from Wandsworth prison while awaiting trial for spying for Iran has been jailed for 14 years and three months.

Daniel Khalife, 23, sparked a nationwide manhunt after clinging to the underside of a food delivery lorry to break out of the Category B jail on 6 September last year.

He evaded capture for three days before he was spotted riding a stolen mountain bike along the canal towpath in Northolt, west London – about 14 miles away.

Khalife, who was a lance corporal in the Royal Signals, was being held on remand accused of using his role in the military to pass secret information to Iranian spies.

He was arrested after telling the British security services he wanted to be a “double agent” and claimed he had cultivated the relationship over more than two years in the national interest.

But he was found guilty of a charge under the Official Secrets Act and another under the Terrorism Act at the end of last year at Woolwich Crown Court, having admitted escaping from lawful custody part-way through his trial.

Sentencing as it happened

Sentencing Khalife, Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb told him: “When you joined the Army as a young man, you had the makings of an exemplary soldier. However, through the repeated violation of your oath of service, you showed yourself to be, instead, a dangerous fool.”

She added: “You embarked on the course of conduct I have described because of a selfish desire to show off, to achieve by unregulated means what you were told will be difficult for you to achieve by conventional promotion.

“The mere fact that you started on this dangerous and fantastical plan demonstrates your immaturity and lack of wisdom, that you thought it was appropriate to insert yourself – an unauthorised, unqualified and uninformed junior soldier – into communication with an enemy state is perhaps the clearest indication of the degree of folly in your failure to understand at the most obvious level the risk you posed.”

She said he would have been a blackmail risk for his whole career had he not been caught.

The judge said Khalife contacted MI5 and MI6 in his attempts to become a double agent but was ignored. She added: “The greater mischief in your offending is that, having failed to engage any response from the intelligence services of the United Kingdom, you continued betraying your country and exposed others to the possibility of harm.”

There was no reaction from Khalife, who looked down as the judge read out his sentence.

The court heard Khalife, from Kingston, in southwest London, joined the Army aged 16, before contacting an Iranian middle-man through Facebook.

Giving evidence, he said he wanted to prove himself after a senior officer told him he would not be able to work in intelligence because his mother was born in Iran.

Khalife left material in public locations in exchange for cash in an old-fashioned spy tactic known as the “dead drop” or “dead letter box”.

He told his handlers he would stay in the military for 25-plus years for them and twice travelled from his barracks, in Staffordshire, to the Iranian embassy in South Kensington, in London.

The court heard he flew to Istanbul, where he stayed in the Hilton hotel between 4 and 10 August 2020, and “delivered a package” for Iranian agents.

The contact continued while he was deployed to Fort Hood, Texas, where he received training in Falcon, a military communications system and even after he was arrested and released on bail.

Khalife told the jury he was an English “patriot” and “not a terrorist or a traitor,” claiming he “thought he could be James Bond” but had only passed on fake or useless information.

But prosecutors said he “exposed military personnel to serious harm” when he shared sensitive information including a handwritten list of serving soldiers, including some in the SAS and SBS special services.

Khalife’s spying activities will not go down in the “annals of history,” his barrister told the court at his sentencing.

Gul Nawaz Hussain KC reminded the judge how they described his actions as more Scooby Doo than James Bond, adding: “What Daniel Khalife clearly chose to do was not born of malice, was not born of greed, religious fervour or ideological conviction.

“His intentions were neither sinister nor cynical.”

Mr Hussain told the court some of the documents Khalife had forged to pass to the Iranians were “laughably fake”.

Police said he had been planning his “pretty audacious” escape for “quite some time” and the court heard he wrote in his prison diary of a “failed” attempt on 21 August last year.

Khalife, who got a job in the prison kitchen, said he used the trousers inmates wore as uniform, to make a rope, which he attached to the Bidfood lorry on 1 September to test prison security as it made its daily deliveries.

“When I had made the decision to actually leave the prison I was going to do it properly,” he said, describing how he concealed himself, resting his back on the sling as the vehicle was searched.

The driver Balazs Werner said two guards told him someone was missing as they checked the truck with a torch and mirror and he was surprised he was allowed to drive off and that the prison was not in lockdown.

Khalife said he waited for the lorry to stop, dropped to the ground and lay in the prone position until it moved off.

MI5, the Ministry of Defence and counter-terrorism police launched a nationwide manhunt, fearing Khalife would try to flee to Tehran or get to the Iranian embassy in London.

He used the phone at the Rose of York pub in Richmond before a contact withdrew £400 from a nearby cashpoint, which he used to buy a sleeping bag, a mobile phone and a change of clothes.

CCTV footage captured his movements as he bought clothes from Marks & Spencer, stole a hat from Mountain Warehouse, drank coffee at McDonald’s and even read about his escape in the newspaper.

The court heard that while he was on the run, Khalife was in contact with his Iranian handlers, who used the code name “David Smith”, and he sent the message: “I wait.”

When he was arrested on the footpath of the Grand Union Canal on 9 September Khalife told police: “My body aches. I f****d myself up under the lorry” and “I don’t know how immigrants do it”.

He told jurors his time on the run showed “what a foolish idea it was to have someone of my skillset in prison”.

The boss of GB Energy has told Sky News it could take 20 years to deliver a Labour government pledge of 1,000 jobs for Aberdeen.

Sir Keir Starmer promised voters his flagship green initiative, which will be headquartered in the northeast of Scotland, would cut consumer energy bills by as much as £300.

It is one of Labour’s five key missions for this parliament after a manifesto commitment to “save families hundreds of pounds on their bills, not just in the short term, but for good”.

In his first broadcast interview, Juergen Maier, appointed by Downing Street as GB Energy’s start-up chairman, suggested this was a “very long-term project” spanning decades and repeatedly refused to say when household prices would be slashed.

“I know that you are asking me for a date as to when I can bring that, but GB Energy has only just been brought into creation and we will bring energy bills down,” Mr Maier said.

The state-owned company will not supply power to homes but it will invest in new renewable projects while attempting to attract private investors.

Aberdeen HQ ‘nervous’

Labour hopes GB Energy will help workers move from oil and gas and has pledged 1,000 jobs for Aberdeen, where the initiative will be based.

Aberdeen and Grampian Chamber of Commerce told Sky News the estimated 50,000 local people currently employed in the industry are “nervous”.

Chief executive Russell Borthwick said: “I think the [GB Energy] ambition is good. It needs some quick wins.

“Right now, this city is nervous. We need to give the industry more confidence that things are going to start moving more quickly.

“What we do have is not a great deal of progress. We’ve had a lot of positive meetings with GB Energy. I think we are really looking over the next six months for that to be delivered on.”

1,000 jobs in 20 years? ‘Absolutely’

It comes after Energy Minister Michael Shanks MP recently said the UK government had “not moved away” from an ambition of creating “over 1,000 jobs”.

Sky News pushed Mr Maier for clarity on this pledge given the looming crisis in the North Sea industry.

He said: “Great British Energy itself is going to create over the next five years, 200 or 300 jobs in Aberdeen. That will be the size of our team. I have said in the very long term when we become a major energy champion it may be many more than that.”

Pressed to define “long term”, he replied: “Look, we grow these companies. Energy companies grow over 10 or 20 years, and we are going to be around in 20 years.”

He said “absolutely” when asked directly if it could take two decades to fulfil the commitment of 1,000 jobs.

‘Huge risk of not delivering’

Unions told Sky News there is a risk of GB Energy over-promising and under-delivering.

Unite’s Scottish Secretary Derek Thomson said: “If you look at how many jobs are going to go in the northeast, if GB energy does not pick up the pace and start to move workers in there and start to create proper green jobs, then I’m afraid we could be looking at a desolation of the northeast.”

Read more:
GB Energy: The burning question facing ministers on UK-owned clean power
Cut taxes to get people buying electric cars – motor industry
Details on plan for Great British Energy

Prospect, which represents more than 22,000 workers across the energy industry, said the current vision seems risky.

Richard Hardy, Scotland secretary, said: “I don’t want to be accused of cynicism, but I do want to see a plan.

“If what happens is that it only creates 200 or 300 jobs, then I think most people would see that as being a failure. There is a huge risk for them in not actually delivering.

“They must understand the political risk they are taking in doing this. It has to be a success for them because otherwise it is going to be a stick to beat them with.”

More people are crossing the English Channel in small boats on the weekend. Our data analysis shows last year 40% of the total number of arrivals happened on a Saturday or Sunday.

We have been looking into possible reasons why many more people are arriving in small boats on the weekend, and the explanation might not be quite what you expect.

Here are a few theories.

French staffing and resources

One suggestion is that French border force, police and coastguard are not working to a consistent level seven days a week.

“Gangs have realised there are lower or less engaged staffing on weekends on the French side,” a former senior Home Office official who worked closely on deals with French tells me.

A former immigration minister said they found it “frustrating” that “we were paying the French but weren’t able to specify operational deployments”.

They said it would “not surprise me if the French had fewer people at the weekend and the people smugglers have come to realise that”.

Hundreds of millions have been given by the UK to France to police the Calais coast, most recently almost £500m in 2023.

Another former senior government official with responsibility for borders said the French would be able to demonstrate that “hundreds or thousands of officers are working there” but “strategically it suits France to have the gust with us”.

But when we put this to the French side there was a pushback.

Marc de Fleurian, the Calais MP from Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party, says “blaming the other side of the Channel” is the “easy answer”.

He said it’s “cowardly to say it’s the other side’s fault”.

Read more:
UK to introduce ‘world first’ sanctions regime to target smugglers
Can government make bold plan bite?
Starmer’s year to prove he can deliver on small boats

Pierre Henri Dumont, who was the Calais MP from 2017-2024, said: “The reality is you can have as many police officers as you want, but people will cross the Channel. If you have eight rather than 100 police officers that won’t change anything at all.”

A French coastguard source told Sky News there are the same staffing levels at the weekend, he says “any suggestion there is less staffing on the weekends is laughable and an easy thing to say”.

Smuggler planning

Smuggler supply chains might be linked to a specific day for a range of reasons, for example, as one former senior Home Office official suggests, the fact “boat engines, or parts, might arrive on a Friday”.

Mr Dumont says smuggling networks rely on people to do small jobs, like transporting boats, who may also have day jobs in the week. He says the reasons behind the weekend uptick “are not necessarily predictable ones”.

Another factor may be that because French police tend not to intervene once a boat is in the water, many small boats set off from inland waterways. The canal-type waterways which come inland before the Channel are often full of fishing boats on weekdays, making it easier to launch from the waterways on weekends.

Another suggestion from a Home Office source is that while many migrants who cross the channel are based in the camps around Calais, many use public transport to arrive for a timed departure and are therefore reliant on transport timetables which may be more limited at different times of the week.

Weather coincidence

Leaked Home Office analysis shows that of the number of weekend days where small boat crossings were more likely because of good weather conditions was disproportionately high last year.

The figures show that 61 out of 197 days where the weather meant there was a realistic possibility, likely or highly likely there would be a channel crossing were weekend days. However, we only have figures for 2024, and it seems unlikely the weather alone could account for three years of higher crossings on weekend days.