- Kamran Faridi worked for FBI from 1995 till 2020.
- He was jailed in 2022 for threatening ex-FBI colleagues.
- He played key role in arrest of Karachi businessman Jabir Motiwala.
LONDON: The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) former high-profile agent Kamran Faridi has been released from the Florida Prison after spending nearly four years on the condition he will deport himself to Pakistan before August this year.
According to a court order seen by this reporter, South District of New York’s District Judge Cathy Seibel ordered the release of Faridi on a reduced prison sentence of 72 months from the original sentence of 84 months.
The release of the once high-flying spy operator — once a Karachi street gangster — is not the end of his trial and troubles. The US government has not only revoked his citizenship but also his two residence permits facilitated by it in the UAE and Turkiye. There is an agreement that Faridi will leave the soil permanently before the end of August this year, for Karachi.
Now out of jail and living with his wife Kelly in Florida, Faridi told Geo News he has been released on several conditions, including his agreement to surrender his citizenship — that he got in the early 1990s after agreeing to work for the FBI in some of the organisation’s most dangerous operations — and undertaking to leave the US for Pakistan and never return to the States.
Faridi was jailed on December 9, 2022, on charges of transmitting threats to three former FBI colleagues — his FBI supervisor, an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) officer, and his former FBI handler, who had recently retired — in New York’s Westchester County where JTTF headquarters is located.
Faridi’s profile and his role in the arrest of Karachi businessman Jabir Motiwala in London on August 16, 2018, was highlighted by this reporter for the first time to shed extensive light on how a Karachi street criminal ended up becoming a valued FBI agent, who was tasked to carry out sensitive counter-terrorism operations in several Muslim countries including Pakistan.
It was Faridi who had led the US law enforcement plot in Karachi and New York between 2009-2013 to trap Motiwala during several meetings — posing as an operative of Russian mafia interested in making big money through arms deals, narcotics smuggling and extortion. It was based on whatever evidence Faridi had gathered on Motiwala that the US decided to arrest Motiwala in London.
Things turned a different turn when Faridi fell out with his FBI handlers and threatened to tell the UK court under oath that Motiwala was an innocent man who never agreed to any kind of narcotics and arms smuggling deal, that there was no such thing as his gathered evidence and that the FBI had asked him to lie about Motiwala in his witness statements.
The downfall of Faridi — who worked for the FBI from 1995 until February 2020 — began on March 2, 2020, when he was arrested at London Heathrow Airport while trying to enter the UK from Miami with his wife Kelley. He had spoken to the London lawyers of Motiwala — who was in Belmarsh prison at the time waiting for extradition to the US — before taking the flight to London, intent on recording a witness statement before the UK High Court to testify about the FBI ordering him to lie about Motiwala’s alleged involvement in the importation of Class-A drugs, extortion, money-laundering and connections to the D-company.
The FBI had learned of Faridi’s intentions after listening to wire-tapped phone conversations between him and Motiwala’s London lawyers. In London, he was arrested on March 3, 2020, before he could come out and rendered back to the US in chains the same evening with an FBI escort. He has come out of the confinement now exactly four years later.
As Faridi prepares to leave the US for the last time after spending nearly 30 years in the country and giving the best of his life to the US intelligence, more uncertainties and complexities await him.
The former Karachi boy returns to the Karachi streets which are no longer recognisable for him, and where he enters into completely uncharted waters.
