A 44-year-old Woodland Hills woman was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport on Saturday night after federal authorities said she helped Iran move weapons to its proxies in Africa. Shamim Mafi was preparing to board a flight to Turkey when agents detained her, hours after a criminal complaint was filed in Los Angeles federal court.
The complaint says Mafi brokered the sale of drones, bombs, bomb fuses and millions of rounds of ammunition between Iran and the Sudanese Armed Forces. It also says she used an Omani shell company to move weapons and cash, and that documents obtained by the FBI tied her company to shipments of Qods Mohajer-6 drones, the same model Iran has long supplied Russia in Ukraine.
Mafi first left Iran for Istanbul in 2013 and later settled in Los Angeles, where she got her green card in 2016. Authorities allege that after receiving it, she quickly began working for Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security. The complaint says she also used her access inside government circles to help settle a property dispute over an inheritance from her late father and to get her son out of mandatory military service.
By July of 2024, the case had moved into detailed logistics. A Sudanese weapons broker WhatsApped Mafi to arrange a shipment of the drones, and the complaint says her shell company was listed as the exporter while the Sudanese Ministry of Defense was named as the buyer. Records described in the filing show meetings between Mafi and Sudanese contacts in Iran, including one Tehran rendezvous where officials waited to be picked up from the airport so they could inspect bomb fuses.
The complaint says the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps blocked Mafi from entering the facility because it did not permit women there, so she sent a man in her place. It also says a portion of the money moved in crates of $100 bills, with other transfers routed through hawalas and banks in Dubai. Federal investigators said at least some of the weapons sold to the military arrived in Sudan from China.
Social media posts reviewed by investigators show Mafi posing with assault rifles and other military hardware at the offices of an arms supplier in Turkey. The complaint says she helped that same company secure a spot at last year’s SHOT Show, underscoring how the network stretched beyond one country and one transaction. Her arrest at Los Angeles International Airport made her the third Angeleno from the city’s Iranian diaspora to be collared by federal authorities in three weeks.
The case lands as Sudan’s military remains locked in a civil war that has killed more than 100,000 people and displaced millions more since 2023. The complaint’s account of drones, bomb fuses, cash, hawalas and Dubai banks points to an effort built to evade U.S. sanctions, and Mafi’s arrest suggests federal authorities believe they have reached the point where the logistics trail meets the person who helped move it.
