A fantasist - but still a danger Mixed picture of ineptitude and threat that spurred police to act

At the heart of the Daniel Khalife trial has been the question: is he an amateurish fantasist who convinced himself he was playing a game of chess with spies, or a serious figure in the global world of espionage?

- Kevin Rawlinson

The answer, police say, is a bit of both. They believed Khalife to be inept in many regards. His barrister, Gul Nawaz Hussain KC, said he was "hapless" and "sometimes bordering on the slapstick" - more Scooby-Doo than 007.

But detectives also built up evidence of a man able to mount the prison escape that sparked a huge manhunt last year, and one whose actions in the employ of Iranian security services may have materially affected people's lives.

Now, a jury has convicted Khalife of working as an asset for Iranian spies while serving as a British soldier as he sought to evade capture. He had already admitted escaping from Wandsworth prison as he awaited trial.

"It is difficult to disentangle [Khalife's] ego - the fantasy he created, the money he earned, and his inability to understand the damage he was causing here," Commander Dominic Murphy of Scotland Yard's SO15 counter-terrorism unit told reporters, when asked about Khalife's motivation to work for Tehran. "Put it all together and it is a mixed picture. And it is a picture of Daniel Khalife."

For his part, Khalife told the jury he had sought to cultivate his Iranian intelligence contacts to help British security services. He claimed he mainly fed his handlers either fake information, or real documents that were already in the public domain. And, once he had their trust, he had wanted to work as a double agent for the British.

The breakout, he said, was to demonstrate the folly of locking up someone with his talents.

Here was a man who really was spying for Tehran, a jury has found. He was passing his handlers information that, while often fake, could easily have put the British-Iranian former prisoner in Tehran Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe at risk, police say. And, at the same time, here was a man who thought he would be able to secure his recruitment by British intelligence by ringing MI5's front desk.