Irvine CA March 5 2019 An Irvine security guard believed this nation was in the midst of a “hot political meltdown” in late 2017, wanted to live off the grid in the Middle East and thought it would be “freaking cool” to possess a U.S. military-grade, fully-automatic machine gun banned from civilian possession.

Hamed Kabir, once a translator for Australian Special Forces, used the darknet portion of the internet to shop for the restricted M4 carbine rifle, special optics, ammunition and a silencer before finding a seller willing to make a $7,700 deal.

But Kabir, who worked in a guard booth at Irvine apartment complex Turtle Ridge near UC Irvine, didn’t know the seller secretly worked for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Inside Orange County’s Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse, prosecutors claimed Kabir earned an 18-month prison sentence, partly because of the sophistication he’d employed trying to make his purchase without law enforcement detection.

But late last month U.S. District Court Judge James V. Selna decided the appropriate punishment is a year in federal prison plus supervised probation for 36 months upon his release.

Kabir, who was born in 1992, has until noon on March 8 to self-surrender for his incarceration.

OC Weekly

Share this post: on Twitter on Facebook