Arif Durrani

Arif Durrani was a Pakistani arms dealer convicted of illegally providing HAWK antiaircraft missile parts to Iran.¹ He was the son of an army general.²

Arms Dealing and BCCI Connections

Durrani was described as a wealthy arms merchant who traveled the world in luxury.³ He admitted to supplying Iran with arms and stated that he was part of a joint operation conducted by the United States and Israel to release American hostages in the Middle East.⁴ He met with a U.S. official named Oliver North to obtain HAWK parts.⁵ His arrest on October 3, 1986, occurred one month before the U.S. government's secret arms-for-hostages deal with Tehran was revealed.⁶

Durrani had close connections to the BCCI, knowing Agha Hasan Abedi personally and having his operations financed by the bank.⁷ He grew up in Karachi with many of the men who became BCCI executives and worked with them from the beginning of his career as an arms dealer.⁸ He stated that BCCI basically funded operations on instructions from the government of Pakistan, including the construction of a Mirage factory.⁹

He outlined BCCI's and Asaf Ali's weapons deals across the globe, from Bulgaria to Nigeria.¹⁰ Durrani also stated that BCCI steered some of his business to First American Bank in New York City, considering BCCI and First American Bank interchangeable for financial transactions.¹¹

Until his arrest, Durrani was the managing director of Merex, a California arms firm that supplied the Israelis.¹²

Sentence and Appeal

In May 1987 Chief Judge T.F. Gilroy Daly of the federal court in Connecticut sentenced Durrani to ten years in prison and a fine of 2 million dollars for illegally exporting HAWK missile parts to Iran in 1986, with a concurrent ten years and 1 million dollars for selling arms without registering with the State Department. The judge told him his testimony was riddled with "greed, lies, money, perjury, avarice and conniving" and that "your behavior was bordering on treason."¹³ In December 1987 the Second Circuit rejected his defense that he had acted on the orders of Oliver North and John Poindexter, the first use of what became known as the "Oliver North defense," and upheld the conviction (United States v. Durrani, 835 F.2d 410). A petition he filed in 2003, his fourth post-conviction attack on the sentence, was denied (Durrani v. United States, 294 F. Supp. 2d 204, D. Conn.).¹⁴¹⁵

From prison he told Time in 1991 that "Asaf is B.C.C.I.'s man in the weapons business," referring to Asaf Ali.¹⁶