A weapons smuggler who used a fishing boat to ship ballistic missile parts from Iran to Houthi rebels in Yemen has been sentenced to 40 years in a US prison.
Pakistani national Muhammad Pahlawan was detained during a US military operation in the Arabian Sea in January 2024 - during which two US Navy Seals drowned.
Pahlawan's crew testified they had been duped into taking part, having believed they were working as fishermen.
The crew's detailed testimonies to a court in the US state of Virginia provide a rare look inside a smuggling operation that helped power the attacks.
The components found on Pahlawan's boat were "some of the most sophisticated weapon systems that Iran proliferates to other terrorist groups", US federal prosecutors said after his trial.
The 49-year-old was sentenced on Thursday, having been previously convicted on five counts - including terrorism offences and transporting weapons of mass destruction. He was sentenced to spend in jail a total of 480 months, or 40 years.
For this journey, Pahlawan was paid 1,400 million rials (£25,200; $33,274) - a substantial fee prosecutors at his trial described as "danger money".
The trip was "part of a larger operation" funded and co-ordinated by two Iranian brothers, Yunus and Shahab Mir'kazei, said the then-US Department of Defense (now known as the Department of War) in a statement in June.
The Mir'kazei brothers are allegedly affiliated, it added, with Iran's Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC) - the most powerful armed force in Iran. The IRGC is designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the US.
Both Shahab and Yunus Mir'kazei have been charged by the American authorities, but are still at large and believed to be in Iran.
The American military said the packages found on board the Yunus were the first Iranian-supplied weapons to be seized by US forces since the Houthis had started attacking vessels in the Red Sea a few months earlier. But Pahlawan had been following a common route for smugglers carrying weapons bound for Yemen.
Between 2015 and 2023, US forces and their allies seized almost 2.4 million pieces of ammunition, 365 anti-tank guided missiles, and more than 29,000 small arms and light weapons from small boats in the Arabian Sea, according to a UN report.
Typically, smugglers use dhows - a type of small boat, often for fishing - to transport cargo close to the coast of Somalia.
As with the Yunus, it is here that weapons are transferred to other, smaller boats, which then set sail to "secluded beaches off the southern coast of Yemen… where they are then smuggled across the desert to Houthi-controlled areas of the country", the UN Office on Drugs and Crime report says.