UAE Court Sentences Sudanese Arms Network to Life Imprisonment

The threads of the case began when a private jet landed at an UAE airport for refueling, coming from a foreign country under the official guise of carrying medical supplies. However, judicial inspection procedures revealed a secret cargo containing nearly five million rounds of "Goryunov" machine gun ammunition en route to the Sudanese Armed Forces without legal licenses. This incident led security agencies to dismantle an organized network for managing illicit military equipment deals and money laundering. Investigations and recordings showed that the operations were carried out by direct commission from the Sudanese Military Armament Committee under the supervision of Assistant Commander-in-Chief Yasser Al-Atta, in financial coordination with Colonel Othman Al-Zubair, and with approvals and end-user certificates secured through politician Ahmed Rabie Sayed Ahmed, while former intelligence director Salah Gosh played pivotal roles in mediation and passing the shipments.

To conceal the military nature of the deals and circumvent financial oversight, the defendants resorted to commercial facades and front companies, one of which was linked to a Sudanese-Ukrainian businessman subjected to international sanctions. They used forged invoices and banking contracts claiming to finance "sugar import" deals to justify the flow of bank transfers. The dimensions of the scheme did not stop at the transport of weapons and drones, but also included personal profit and illicit secret commissions approaching 2.6 million dollars deducted as price differentials. The former director of Gosh's office, Khaled Youssef Mukhtar, took charge of receiving the shares allocated to his boss, with cash amounts seized in the possession of network members inside their hotel rooms.

Faced with what the court considered a direct violation of state sovereignty and an attempt to use its territory as a military transit platform in an external conflict, the Abu Dhabi Federal Court of Appeal sentenced eight main convicts to life imprisonment and fined each of them one million dirhams. They are: Yasser Al-Atta, Salah Gosh, Othman Al-Zubair, Ahmed Rabie Sayed Ahmed, Rashid Omar, Ahmed Abdullah (Khalfallah), Mohamed Fathi Al-Beik, and Maher Abdel-Jalil. The court also sentenced seven other defendants to three years in prison with a fine of one million dirhams each for money laundering crimes, while acquitting both Mubarak Ali Al-Sheikh and Musab Awad Al-Karim Hassan of the charges against them. The court concluded its rulings by dissolving and revoking the licenses of six implicated companies, fining each one million dirhams, confiscating one million and 545 thousand dirhams seized with the ammunition and communication devices, and deporting the convicts from the country after serving their sentences.