Kam­ran Faridi, a former gangster from Karachi, later serving as a high-profile agent of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), has been released after serving nearly four years of his seven-year sentence in a Florida prison.


Faridi was sentenced to 84 months of imprisonment on his convictions for “transmitting threats in interstate commerce, threatening to assault a federal officer, and obstruction of justice,” on December 9, 2022.


On March 18, 2024, a New York federal judge, reduced the sentence of Kamran Faridi to 72 months.

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Faridi was recently released on some conditions which most prominently include surrendering his US citizenship and agreeing to leave the United States permanently before August.


Faridi, now 60, grew up in Gulshan-i-Iqbal, Karachi. He was affiliated with the Peoples Students Federation (PSF), and was a close associate of PSF leader Najeeb Ahmed, who was assassinated in 1990.


His family sent him to Sweden after he was found involved in several violent acts.


Faridi migrated to the US in 1991, and within four years, he purchased a gas station in Atlanta, Georgia. There he met some FBI agents who were impressed with his proficiency in Urdu, Pun­jabi, Hindi, and Spanish. In 1996, they formally recruited him as a full-time informant and agent, according to Dawn.


Faridi’s journey from a street hustler to FBI agent came to light when he played a pivotal role in the arrest of a Karachi businessman Jabir Motiwala in London in 2018. He orchestrated a plot, posed as a Russian mafia operative, to trap Motiwala in illegal activities. However, a rift developed between Faridi and his FBI handlers when he threatened to expose their manipulation of evidence against Motiwala. This led to the end of his career and he was arrested by Scotland Yard shortly afterwards.

In a report by Geo News, Murtaza Ali Shah explains the extraordinary journey of the Pakistani-origin FBI agent, whose residence permits in UAE and Turkey, issued by FBI have been revoked and he is released only on the condition of never coming back to the US.