Woodland Hills resident Shamim Mafi, 44, was arrested Saturday at LAX on charges of brokering the sale of Iranian-made weapons to Sudan, which is in its fourth year of a bloody civil war.
“She was acting as a broker for the government of Iran and trafficking ammunitions, bombs, bomb fuses, drones – really dangerous arms,” said First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli.
Mafi is an Iranian national who became a lawful United States resident in 2016. She and an unnamed co-conspirator operated an Oman-based company called Atlas International Business through which the arms were trafficked.
Atlas received over $7 million in payments in 2025. Documents showed a case full of $100 bills, reportedly a partial payment for six armed drones and 300 guided bombs – with a total sale worth more than 60 million Euros.
The complaint says that Mafi submitted a letter of intent to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to purchase 55,000 bomb fuses for the Sudanese Ministry of Defense.
“Iran is heavily economically sanctioned,” Essayli said. “They’re starving for money. It’s very hard for them to get money, which then they fund to weaponize against their adversaries, such as the U.S. So what’s he’s doing was helping them get tens, hundreds of millions of dollars through trafficking of these arms.”
Mafi was arrested at LAX with a ticket to Turkey, and investigators worried she was attempting to leave the country.
She is charged with a violation of 50 U.S.C. War and Defense § 1705. She is also charged with conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. She appeared in U.S. District Court in downtown Los Angeles on Monday but did not enter a plea.
If convicted, Mafi faces a statutory maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison.
