How 'UK's largest phone smuggling network' was uncovered by Met - BBC News
BBC Homepage
Skip to content
Accessibility Help
Your account
Home
News
... (rest of the navigation as per original text)
How 'largest phone smuggling network' was uncovered
Image source: Metropolitan Police
Image caption: Police arrested Amir Muhammad Khadikhel and Ismat Miakhel in September 2025
By Sonja Jessup, London home affairs correspondent
Published 25 September 2026
It started with a single stolen mobile phone, found inside a sealed parcel, inside a warehouse near Heathrow airport. It ended in police dismantling what detectives believe to be the UK's largest phone smuggling network.
The device had been electronically tracked to the warehouse not by officers, but by a victim who had it stolen from them just before Christmas in 2024 and alerted the DHL courier company. "The phone was ringing in the package," explains Commander Andy Featherstone, the Metropolitan police's lead on mobile phone theft. "It was still on. Which is very unusual..."
Stolen phones are often wrapped in aluminium foil to block wireless signals and prevent tracking.
When police were called, they found more than 800 devices, packaged in batches of five, stacked into nine boxes—some wrapped in foil, others in bubble wrap. All had been stolen and were destined for shipping to Hong Kong.
Operation Echosteep, a major inquiry, was launched, enlisting detectives specializing in armed robberies and drug smuggling. Further shipments were intercepted, and officers used forensics on the packages to identify two men.
In September 2025, police stopped a car being driven through Waltham Forest and arrested Amir Muhammad Khadikhel and Ismat Miakhel. Inside, they found several phones strewn around the back seat, with others on the floor wrapped in foil. Both men were wearing necklaces featuring pins to remove the handsets' Sim cards.
Police say about 2,000 more devices were discovered at properties linked to them. Southwark Crown Court heard that one shop, Roshan Fruit and Nuts, had been used to store stolen phones—complete with a trapdoor leading to a basement filled with packages of phones wrapped in foil, as well as £44,665 in cash.
In another property, the court heard stolen phones had been found stored inside the microwave.
Prosecutor Karen Robinson KC said the men played a "leading role" in a "sophisticated and criminal network" that saw more than 5,000 phones seized by police with a UK value of around £5.5m.
The court heard Khadikhel, who fled Afghanistan in 2019 and sought asylum in the UK, and Miakhel, from Walthamstow, along with Mansoor Mohammed (who arrived from India on a visa in 2019), pleaded guilty to conspiracy to handle stolen goods and participating in criminal activities of an organized crime group.