Heroin Kingpin’s Gun Deal Plot Blown Inside Prison
Inside Job: Smuggler’s Gun Deal Foiled Behind Bars
Heroin smuggler Ameran Zeb Khan, 47, tried to hack his jail time by masterminding a firearms deal from inside prison. Using a secret mobile phone snuck in by his nephew and right-hand man, Sarweeth Rehman, 29, Khan hunted online for deadly weapons, including “.38 special” handguns and AK74 rifles.
They even came up with sneaky codewords – “cars”, “car parts”, “makeup”, and “pineapples” – to cover their tracks. But their plans spectacularly fell apart, landing Khan extra years behind bars.
Secret Signals & Outside Connections
Locked up in a Birmingham jail, Khan ran his gang’s operations via prison landlines and the hidden phone. He and Rehman passed orders to their wives and gangsters on the outside, including the Rahman brothers – Khaibar and Akbar – and Ahmed Hussain.
Between July and September 2018, the crew targeted gun deals across Acocks Green, Sparkhill, and South Yardley. A rapid police swoop in September 2018 led to a converted blank-firing pistol and 16 rounds of ammo being seized from a car in Small Heath. The driver, 28-year-old Iqrar Zamir from Alum Rock, was caught and jailed for five years.
Longer Sentences for Gun Runners
Khan was originally slammed with 22 years in 2017 for trying to smuggle heroin worth £10 million from Pakistan. He hoped feeding info about the gun plot to the authorities would slice a decade off his sentence.
But the gambit backfired. Just before their trial in October 2024, Khan, Rehman, the Rahman brothers, Hussain, and Khan’s wife Gulshan Ara copped to their crimes.
On 6 January, Khan and Rehman each got an extra six years added. The Rahman brothers received six years and eight months each, Hussain bagged five years, while Ara was handed a two-year suspended sentence.
