A prisoner who worked alongside Daniel Khalife in the kitchens of HMP Wandsworth has been convicted of helping the escaped spy evade a three-day, nationwide manhunt.
Adeel Khan, 32, of Waltham Forest, was found guilty at Snaresbrook Crown Court on Tuesday of assisting an offender after Khalife’s escape from the prison in September 2023. A jury convicted him by a majority of 11 to one. He will be sentenced on 4 September.
His co-defendant, Imran Chowdhury, 26, of Chingford, was cleared of the same charge. The court heard he withdrew £400 in cash for Khalife at a Richmond ATM on the night of the escape without knowing he was helping a fugitive.
It’s the first detailed account of how Khalife – since convicted of breaching the Official Secrets and Terrorism Acts and jailed for 14 years and three months – managed to stay ahead of police for as long as he did, and it traces straight back to HMP Wandsworth’s own kitchens: the same prison whose security function had already been shown to have been compromised from the top two years before Khalife ever went over the wall.
Khan and Khalife worked together there. That access was apparently enough for Khalife to trust Khan with his prison number, personal mobile number and Snapchat handle: all found written in a diary in Khalife’s possession when he was arrested near a canal in Northolt. Khan separately pleaded guilty to possessing a mobile phone in prison. The handset itself was never recovered, but it explains the “regular and persistent” contact the two men kept up after the escape, using numbers borrowed from members of the public before Khan could get Khalife the cash to buy his own.
That cash came via Chowdhury. CCTV played to the jury showed him walking with Khalife along George Street in Richmond just before 10.40pm on the night of the escape, before the pair turned into an alleyway to a cashpoint out of camera view. Chowdhury withdrew £400; around £200 of it, in £20 notes, was later found on Khalife when he was arrested. Khan arranged for his then-girlfriend, Nazish Mahmood, to pay Chowdhury £120 for the errand.
The verdict split the two men cleanly. Judge Murray Shanks said the outcome suggested Chowdhury “didn’t know what the hell was going on” – a “reasonable verdict,” he added. Chowdhury’s barrister, James Hasslacher, told the court his client was of good character, in steady work, and had been deceived by a man who “knows how to deceive.” Khan’s barrister, Gregory Fishwick, said his client was now a “very different man” who worked, went to the gym and cared for his elderly grandmother.
Khalife escaped by strapping himself to the underside of a food delivery vehicle.
It’s a case that sits alongside a run of scrutiny already building around how HMP Wandsworth operates day to day. This time it was not a question of welfare inside the prison, but of what its own staff and prisoners can get past its front door.
