CBP SEIZES Iranian Weapons Cache at Houston Port — 14 Containers, $96M in Arms & 9 Arrested
3:22 a.m. Port of Houston, Ship Channel Terminal.
A CBP radiation portal monitor triggered a secondary alert on container OOLU-7741826. The container had been sitting on the dock for 11 minutes, manifested as industrial piping, origin Sohar, Oman, intermediate stop Jebel Ali, UAE, final destination a warehouse in Pasadena, Texas, leased by Gulf Meridian Trading LLC.
The officer on duty, CBP agriculture specialist turned Contraband Enforcement Team Lead Daniel Royce, pulled the container for physical inspection.
The X-ray imaging showed dense metallic objects layered beneath what appeared to be steel pipe segments. Standard oil field equipment would not produce this density pattern, not even close.
Royce called for a non-intrusive inspection unit. The gamma ray scan confirmed it. Underneath 12 tons of legitimate industrial piping sat objects with a composition and geometry that matched military-grade electronics and machined aluminum components. The shapes were wrong for anything in a petroleum supply chain.
By 4:15 a.m., the container was isolated in a secure inspection bay. Within 90 minutes, a CBP tactical team had removed the top layer of piping. Beneath it, packed in foam-lined wooden crates with Arabic and Farsi markings, were guidance components for anti-ship cruise missiles, 72 units, each one wrapped in antistatic film and labeled with serial numbers that didn’t correspond to any commercial product in existence.
That was one container.
Thirteen more were already in transit or sitting in bonded storage across the port complex. And the company that had ordered them had been doing this for 3 years.
February 14th, 2026.
That date would mark the beginning of the largest Iranian weapons interdiction on American soil since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.
Gulf Meridian Trading LLC occupied a modest office suite on Telephone Road in Southeast Houston. The company had been incorporated in Texas in November 2022. Its registered agent was Reza Komali, a 47-year-old dual US-Iranian citizen who had lived in the Houston area since 2009.
On paper, Komali ran a mid-tier import-export business specializing in oil field equipment and industrial machinery for the Middle Eastern energy sector.
The business looked real.
It had contracts with three legitimate drilling operations in Oman. It maintained accounts with two Houston-area freight forwarding companies. It filed taxes. It employed nine people, including an office manager, two logistics coordinators, and a bookkeeper.
Revenue in 2024: $14.2 million.
Revenue in 2025: $22.8 million.
Growth consistent with a company expanding into Gulf State energy infrastructure.
But the growth wasn’t coming from pipe fittings.
Komali’s background, when investigators later reconstructed it, revealed a pattern that had been invisible for years. He had arrived in the United States on a student visa in 2003, attended the University of Houston, and earned a degree in mechanical engineering. He obtained permanent residency through employer sponsorship in 2007 and naturalized in 2012.
His immigration file was clean. No flags, no derogatory information.
He had maintained his Iranian passport, traveling to Tehran roughly twice a year, standard for someone with family there.
What wasn’t in his immigration file: his uncle, Hossein Komalifard, had served as a procurement officer for the IRGC’s Aerospace Force Division until 2018. That connection didn’t appear in any US database. It existed only in Iranian military personnel records and in the memories of intelligence officers who tracked IRGC logistics networks.
That connection mattered because Gulf Meridian Trading wasn’t just importing oil field parts.
It was operating as a front-end node in a procurement network that stretched from Tehran to Houston, with intermediary stops in Oman, the UAE, and Malaysia.
The network’s purpose: acquiring Western and Chinese military technology components, repackaging them through legitimate commercial channels, and routing them to end users connected to Iran’s ballistic missile and naval warfare programs.
And until Daniel Royce’s radiation monitor beeped at 3:22 a.m. on a cold February morning, nobody had looked closely enough.
The initial discovery triggered an immediate notification chain. CBP’s Houston Field Office contacted Homeland Security Investigations within 2 hours. HSI Special Agent in Charge Patricia Moreno activated a joint task force before sunrise.
By 8:00 a.m. on February 14th, a secure conference call connected CBP Houston, HSI, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, and the Defense Intelligence Agency.
The question on that call was straightforward:
Was this an isolated shipment, or was this something bigger?
NCIS provided the first critical piece of context.
Three months earlier, in November 2025, a naval intelligence analyst at the Office of Naval Intelligence had flagged unusual procurement activity emanating from Oman-based shell companies. The analyst had identified a pattern. Small companies in Sohar and Muscat were purchasing dual-use electronics components from suppliers in China and Malaysia, then re-exporting them through UAE free trade zones.
The volumes were too large for the companies’ stated business activities.
The end-use certificates listed oil and gas applications, but some of the components, specifically inertial navigation modules and encrypted radio transceivers, had no civilian equivalent.
That intelligence had been sitting in a classified briefing document. It hadn’t been connected to any domestic US investigation until now.
The container that Royce had flagged, OOLU-7741826, was traced back to a shipper in Sohar called Albar Industrial Solutions.
Albar had been one of the companies flagged in the November ONI report.
The connection was immediate and unambiguous.
Within 48 hours, the task force had a name: Operation Persian Shield.
The first priority was identifying all shipments connected to Gulf Meridian Trading.
CBP’s Automated Targeting System pulled every container manifested to Gulf Meridian or its known freight forwarding partners over the previous 36 months.
The results were staggering.
Gulf Meridian had received 211 containers since January 2023. Most contained legitimate industrial equipment, but cross-referencing the shipping origins against the ONI watchlist identified 14 containers across six separate shipments that had originated from flagged entities in Oman and the UAE.
Of those 14, three had already been received and their contents moved to Gulf Meridian’s warehouse facilities. Two were currently sitting in bonded storage at the port. Nine were in transit on vessels at various points across the Indian Ocean and through the Suez Canal.
The two containers in bonded storage were inspected immediately under emergency authority.
Container TRIU-4429185 held encrypted communications equipment, specifically hardened field radios compatible with Iranian military communication protocols, and 74 satellite uplink modules that matched equipment used by IRGC naval forces in the Persian Gulf.
Total estimated military value: $11.3 million.
Container MSCU-6618073 contained something even more significant. Packed beneath agricultural machinery parts, a combine harvester disassembled into shipping components, were 2,400 military-grade surveillance and strike drones.
Not consumer models.
These were tactical UAVs with hardened airframes, encrypted control links, and mounting points for ordnance. Iranian manufactured. The specific model had been documented by US military intelligence in use by Houthi forces in Yemen and by Iran-backed militias in Iraq.
2,400 of them in one container on American soil.
The discovery of the drones changed the classification of the investigation.
This was no longer a sanctions evasion case.
This was a national security emergency.
The drones alone represented a capability transfer that, if delivered to hostile actors, could threaten US naval assets, allied military installations, and critical infrastructure across the Middle East.
The DIA immediately dispatched a technical exploitation team from the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Missile and Space Intelligence Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Their job: catalog every component in every container, determine its military application, and trace its manufacturing origin.
Meanwhile, HSI began building the case against Komali and Gulf Meridian Trading from the financial side.
The money trail was more sophisticated than the shipping logistics.
Gulf Meridian maintained its primary business accounts at a regional bank in Houston. Deposits and withdrawals looked normal for an import-export operation, but HSI forensic accountants identified a secondary layer.
Komali had established three additional LLCs in Delaware and one in Wyoming, each with separate bank accounts at different institutions.
Funds flowed between these entities in a circular pattern designed to obscure the origin and destination of payments.
The source of the payments traced to two entities.
The first was a trading company registered in the Dubai International Financial Center called Nakheel Global Commodities. Nakheel had transferred $37.4 million to Gulf Meridian’s network of accounts over 26 months.
On paper, these were payments for oil field equipment.
In practice, the amounts far exceeded the value of any legitimate equipment Gulf Meridian had shipped.
The second funding source was more difficult to trace.
Payments totaling $18.6 million had arrived through a series of correspondent banking relationships that routed through banks in Turkey, Malaysia, and Hong Kong before landing in one of Komali’s Delaware LLC accounts.
The originating accounts were connected to entities that the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control had already identified as IRGC-linked. But the layering was dense enough that bank compliance teams had not flagged the transactions.
Combined with the estimated military value of the seized hardware, the total scope of the operation exceeded $96 million.
HSI also obtained warrants for Gulf Meridian’s email and communications records.
Komali used two phone numbers and three email addresses. His business communications were unremarkable, but a fourth email address, registered to a ProtonMail account, showed a different pattern: encrypted communications with individuals in Tehran, Muscat, and Dubai.
The emails referenced shipment codes, timing windows, and what appeared to be quality-control specifications for military components.
One email, sent in December 2025, contained an attached PDF listing specific component part numbers for an anti-ship missile system that matched the items found in container OOLU-7741826.
That PDF became Exhibit A.
While the financial and communications investigation expanded, the task force faced a critical operational decision.
Nine containers were still in transit.
The natural instinct was to intercept them immediately, but the intelligence value of allowing the network to continue operating, even briefly, was significant.
The debate happened on February 19th, 5 days after the initial discovery.
Representatives from HSI, FBI, NCIS, DIA, and the National Security Council participated in a secure video conference.
The question:
Execute immediate takedowns, or conduct a controlled delivery to identify additional network members?
The DIA representative argued for controlled delivery. The nine containers in transit could lead investigators to warehouses, safe houses, and individuals they hadn’t yet identified. Seizing everything now would get headlines, but might leave the deeper network intact.
The FBI’s counterintelligence representative disagreed.
The drones posed an immediate proliferation risk. If even one container was diverted, or its contents moved before agents could secure it, the consequences were unacceptable.
The NSC representative settled the argument: immediate containment, no controlled delivery.
The risk of military technology reaching hostile actors outweighed the intelligence benefits of prolonged surveillance.
The nine containers in transit were flagged through international law enforcement channels.
Three were intercepted at the Suez Canal with cooperation from Egyptian authorities. Two were held in Singapore. Four were stopped at the Port of Jebel Ali by UAE Customs, acting on a US request transmitted through Interpol.
All nine contained military hardware consistent with the containers already seized in Houston.
Back in Houston, surveillance on Komali had been running since February 15th.
FBI counterintelligence agents conducted physical surveillance while HSI ran electronic monitoring under FISA authority.
Komali’s routine was remarkably consistent. Office by 9:00 a.m., lunch at the same Turkish restaurant on Hillcroft Avenue, home by 6:00 p.m., two phone calls per day to numbers in Dubai, one weekly call to a number in Tehran that intelligence agencies identified as belonging to a procurement coordinator within the IRGC’s logistics network.
On February 22nd, Komali deviated from his routine.
He drove to a self-storage facility in Stafford, Texas, southwest of Houston. He entered a unit he had rented under one of his Delaware LLC names and spent 47 minutes inside.
Surveillance cameras at the facility captured him loading three hard-shell cases into his vehicle.
He then drove to a second location, a warehouse on East Industrial Boulevard in Pasadena. This was Gulf Meridian’s primary receiving warehouse.
Komali met with two individuals who had not appeared in the investigation until that moment.
One was later identified as Farshad Nouri, an Iranian national living in Houston on an expired student visa.
The other was Omar Hassan, a Jordanian-born US permanent resident who worked as a freight logistics consultant.
The three men spent 2 hours inside the warehouse.
When they left, Komali no longer had the three cases.
That meeting expanded the target list.
Nouri and Hassan were placed under immediate surveillance.
Over the next 2 weeks, the investigation identified six additional individuals connected to Gulf Meridian’s operations. Three were employees of the company who appeared to have knowledge of the illicit shipments. Two were associates of Nouri who had been assisting with the physical handling of containers at the port. One was a customs broker who had been filing fraudulent import documentation on Gulf Meridian’s behalf for at least 18 months.
The customs broker, David Chen, no relation to any law enforcement personnel, was a particularly significant discovery.
Chen operated a licensed customs brokerage in Houston and handled import documentation for dozens of legitimate companies. He had been classifying Gulf Meridian’s military shipments as industrial machinery and components not elsewhere classified under a harmonized tariff schedule code that attracted minimal scrutiny.
Whether he knew exactly what was in the containers or simply didn’t ask questions he didn’t want answered, that distinction would later become central to his defense.
By early March, Operation Persian Shield had mapped the network’s Houston footprint.
Nine targets for arrest.
Three warehouse locations for simultaneous raids.
The evidence base included the seized containers, financial records, communications intercepts, and surveillance documentation.
The tactical planning for the raids began on March 4th, 2026.
HSI’s Special Response Team would lead the warehouse entries. FBI SWAT would handle the residential arrests. NCIS provided intelligence support and would participate in the exploitation of seized electronics and documents.
The primary target was Gulf Meridian’s Pasadena warehouse on East Industrial Boulevard. This was a 28,000-square-foot facility with loading docks on two sides and a fence perimeter. Surveillance had documented regular activity, including forklift operations and container unloading.
The task force believed additional military components might be stored inside.
The second target was the Stafford self-storage facility where Komali had been observed. Investigators believed this location contained documentation and possibly additional hardware.
The third target was a smaller warehouse in La Marque, south of Houston, that Nouri had visited multiple times. Its purpose was unknown, which made it a priority.
March 11th, 2026. 5:00 a.m. Execution day.
Three strike teams deployed simultaneously across the greater Houston area. The coordination required split-second timing. If any target received warning before their location was hit, evidence could be destroyed in minutes.
Strike Team Alpha approached the Pasadena warehouse from two directions. Sixteen HSI Special Response Team operators in four vehicles, armored, breaching equipment.
The warehouse was dark. No vehicles in the lot.
Thermal imaging showed no occupants.
At 5:02 a.m., the lead vehicle pulled up to the main gate. Bolt cutters. Chain dropped.
Vehicles moved to the loading dock and the main entrance simultaneously. Breaching charges on the loading dock roll-up door, simultaneous ram on the front entrance.
The warehouse was empty of people.
But what was inside confirmed every suspicion the task force had developed over the previous 3 weeks.
Stacked on industrial shelving units across nearly half the warehouse floor were crates matching the ones found in the port containers: additional anti-ship missile guidance assemblies, encrypted radio sets still in factory packaging, components for what the DIA technical team later identified as parts of an Iranian-manufactured coastal defense radar system, and documentation.
Binders of documentation.
Shipping manifests.
End-user certificates, forged ones bearing the letterhead of a fictitious Omani Defense Ministry contractor.
And procurement lists written in Farsi with English technical specifications.
One room in the back of the warehouse had been converted into a communications hub: three laptops, two encrypted satellite phones, a desktop computer with a hardware encryption module attached.
The electronics were seized under a separate warrant and transported to a secure facility for exploitation.
Strike Team Bravo hit the Stafford storage facility at the same moment.
This was a smaller operation: six agents.
The storage unit contained what Komali had been safeguarding: backup hard drives, a thumb drive containing financial records for all four of his LLCs, and a notebook with handwritten notes in Farsi that contained names, phone numbers, and what appeared to be an organizational chart of procurement contacts spanning Iran, Oman, the UAE, and Malaysia.
That notebook would prove more valuable than anything in the warehouse.
Strike Team Charlie entered the La Marque warehouse and found something the investigation hadn’t anticipated.
The space had been configured as an assembly and testing area: workbenches with electronic testing equipment, soldering stations, calibration tools, and partially assembled drone components, the same model found in the port containers.
Someone had been modifying the drones, adding components, adapting them.
For what purpose?
The DIA team would spend months trying to determine.
The residential arrests proceeded in parallel.
FBI SWAT teams hit six locations across Houston between 5:00 and 5:20 a.m.
Komali was arrested at his home in the Memorial area without incident. He was in bed when agents entered. He said nothing. His attorney later stated he had been expecting the arrest for days.
Nouri was arrested at an apartment complex in the Galleria area. He attempted to destroy a cell phone by throwing it in the toilet as agents breached his door. The phone was recovered. Its data, partially corrupted but recoverable, contained encrypted messaging app conversations with contacts in Tehran.
Hassan was arrested at a residence in Sugar Land. He was cooperative. He would later become the first defendant to seek a plea agreement.
The customs broker, Chen, was arrested at his office on the south side of downtown Houston.
He appeared genuinely shocked. He told arresting agents he had no idea what was in the containers. His computer and files were seized.
Three Gulf Meridian employees were arrested at their respective residences. Two additional individuals connected to the port operations were taken into custody at a motel in Texas City where they had been staying.
Nine arrests.
Three warehouses secured.
Fourteen containers seized or interdicted internationally.
And the question that hung over the entire operation:
Was this the full network, or just the part they could see?
The answer came from the electronics.
Over the following weeks, FBI cyber forensics and NSA technical support teams worked on the laptops and phones seized from the Pasadena warehouse and from Komali’s residence.
The desktop computer with the encryption module required specialized tools to access.
When they got in, the contents were extensive.
The procurement lists on that computer referenced not just the items found in the Houston containers, but additional categories of military technology: infrared targeting systems, submarine battery components, and aerospace-grade alloys.
Supplier contacts in China, North Korea, and Russia appeared alongside the already identified Omani and UAE intermediaries.
The scope of the network was far larger than the Houston operation alone.
The communications recovered from Nouri’s partially destroyed phone revealed a parallel channel.
Nouri had been in direct contact with an individual identified only by a code name in Farsi that translated roughly to the engineer.
This person appeared to be a senior coordinator within the IRGC procurement apparatus.
Messages between Nouri and the engineer discussed not just the Houston pipeline, but referenced similar operations in Germany, Italy, and Brazil.
Three other pipelines at minimum.
The FBI and DIA shared this intelligence with allied services through existing bilateral channels.
German Federal Police, the BKA, confirmed they had been investigating a Frankfurt-based trading company with a similar profile.
Italian authorities identified a Genoa-based shipping company that had been flagged but not yet investigated.
Brazilian intelligence had no prior knowledge of activity on their soil.
The Houston node was one piece of a global network.
The arrests had severed one connection.
The others remained active.
The legal proceedings moved quickly by federal standards.
A grand jury in the Southern District of Texas returned a sealed indictment on March 18th, 2026.
The charges were severe: conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, sanctions evasion, money laundering, and for Komali specifically, acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government.
Komali faced a maximum sentence of decades in federal prison.
He retained a defense attorney from Washington, D.C., with experience in national security cases.
His defense strategy, as outlined in early filings, centered on challenging the classification of the seized items as military hardware. His attorneys argued that some of the components had dual-use applications and that Gulf Meridian’s imports fell within a gray area of export control law.
The prosecution’s response was blunt.
The anti-ship missile guidance assemblies had no civilian application. Zero.
The drones were Iranian military production models documented in conflict zones.
The encrypted communications equipment was IRGC standard issue.
There was no gray area.
Hassan, the Jordanian-born logistics consultant, reached a cooperation agreement by late March. His testimony provided the task force with operational details that Komali and Nouri had kept compartmentalized.
Hassan described how containers were selected for the concealment of military items: always mixed with legitimate cargo, always routed through intermediary ports to create additional layers of documentation.
He explained the payment structure.
Hassan received $15,000 per container for his logistics coordination work, paid through a Dubai-based hawala network that left no traditional banking trail.
Hassan also identified a tenth individual who had not been arrested, a man he knew only as Saeed, described as Iranian, mid-30s, who had visited Houston twice in 2025.
Saeed had inspected the La Marque assembly facility and provided technical guidance on the drone modifications.
Saeed had left the United States in January 2026 and had not returned.
Saeed has never been identified.
His real name, nationality, and current location remain unknown.
The FBI placed him on a classified watchlist. As of the last public filings in the case, he has not resurfaced.
The customs broker, David Chen, mounted a vigorous defense.
His attorney argued that Chen had been hired to process paperwork, that he had relied on Gulf Meridian’s representations about cargo contents, and that he had no knowledge of the military nature of the shipments.
Prosecutors countered with email evidence showing that Chen had been paid significantly above market rates for his brokerage services, $8,500 per shipment versus a typical fee of $1,200 to $2,000, and that he had specifically asked Komali in one email to keep the manifest simple for certain containers.
That email undermined the ignorance defense considerably.
Nouri refused to cooperate.
He exercised his right to remain silent from the moment of arrest and maintained that posture through all pre-trial proceedings.
His attorney filed motions to suppress evidence obtained from the damaged phone, arguing that the physical destruction of the device constituted an assertion of privacy rights.
The court denied the motion.
The financial forensics continued to produce results well into March and April.
The $37.4 million from Nakheel Global Commodities in Dubai was traced through a network of eight intermediary accounts. At the end of that chain sat an account at a Tehran-based bank that OFAC had sanctioned in 2019.
The money had originated from an entity that US intelligence assessed to be a funding vehicle for IRGC external procurement operations.
But $12.8 million of the total financial flow could not be fully traced.
The hawala networks Hassan described operated outside the traditional banking system. Cash moved through informal channels that left no electronic records.
Forensic accountants documented the gap.
That money, its origin, its ultimate destination, and what it purchased, remains unaccounted for.
The DIA’s technical exploitation of the seized military hardware produced a detailed inventory.
The 14 containers, combined with the warehouse contents, yielded anti-ship cruise missile guidance components sufficient to assemble approximately 40 complete guidance packages, 2,400 tactical drones, 312 encrypted field communication sets, 74 satellite uplink modules, components for coastal defense radar systems, and miscellaneous electronics, testing equipment, and technical documentation.
Total assessed military value: $96.2 million.
The drone modifications discovered at the La Marque facility were particularly troubling.
The DIA team determined that the standard Iranian military drones were being adapted with commercial GPS modules and modified control software that would allow them to operate on frequencies used by civilian communications infrastructure.
The implication: these drones were being prepared for deployment in environments where standard military control links might be jammed or monitored.
Someone was making them harder to detect and harder to disable.
Who ordered those modifications, and where the modified drones were intended to go, was not answered by the evidence recovered in Houston.
The engineer, Saeed, and whatever command structure they reported to remained beyond the reach of US law enforcement.
By early April 2026, the case had entered its pre-trial phase.
Komali, Nouri, and Chen all indicated they would proceed to trial.
Hassan’s cooperation agreement was formalized.
The five other defendants, three Gulf Meridian employees and two port associates, faced lesser charges and were in various stages of plea negotiations.
The broader intelligence picture that emerged from Operation Persian Shield prompted a policy response.
The Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security issued new due diligence requirements for companies importing dual-use industrial components from Gulf State intermediaries.
CBP increased its targeting algorithms for shipments transiting through Omani and UAE free trade zones.
And the Treasury Department added Nakheel Global Commodities and three associated entities to its specially designated nationals list, freezing any assets within US jurisdiction.
Whether those measures would catch the next Gulf Meridian Trading before 14 containers reached an American port, that was the question no one in the interagency wanted to answer publicly.
The Houston investigation exposed one node.
Intelligence indicated at least three others operating globally.
The Frankfurt connection was under active investigation by German authorities.
The Genoa link remained in preliminary assessment.
The Brazilian thread had barely been pulled.
And those were only the nodes that had been identified.
The IRGC’s procurement methodology, refined over decades of sanctions pressure, was designed for redundancy.
Lose one pipeline, activate another.
Lose a front company, register a new one.
The system assumed attrition.
It was built to survive exactly what happened in Houston.
Komali sits in the federal detention center in Houston awaiting trial.
Nouri is held without bail at the same facility.
Chen posted $2 million bond and is under house arrest with GPS monitoring.
Hassan is in protective custody at an undisclosed location.
The nine containers intercepted internationally remain in the custody of the respective governments that seized them. Diplomatic negotiations over their disposition continue.
The La Marque assembly facility was dismantled and its contents transported to a DIA facility for continued analysis. The modifications to those drones are still being studied. The full capability they were intended to provide has not been conclusively determined.
$12.8 million has never been found.
A man called Saeed has never been identified.
And in Oman, in Dubai, in Frankfurt, and in cities that haven’t been named in any filing, the procurement networks that fed Gulf Meridian Trading continue to operate.
Different names.
Different front companies.
The same methodology.
The containers keep moving.
