A man who spent more than a decade in prison for a murder he didn't commit has been jailed for supplying pistols and ammunition to organized criminals. Ibraheem Abdullah, 42, from Crumpsall, was cornered by police in a north Manchester alleyway after they hacked into the encrypted EncroChat network and uncovered his deals.
Messages showed that Abdullah, also known as Dwaine George and using the handle 'Tenderpasta', mainly sourced customers. Co-defendant Amit Desai, 49, from Leicester, who went by 'Brixonlease', collected cash and sometimes delivered the guns.
Weapons and drugs deals
Among the weapons Abdullah obtained were converted Slovakian-made Grand Power G9A blank-firing pistols, which he purchased from another EncroChat user. He and Desai are said to have charged £10,000 and £8,500 for the two weapons.
In March 2020, Desai supplied half a kilo of cocaine to Abdullah as a down payment to secure more guns, keeping a further 500g so that he could fund the remaining cost of the weapons. He also offered to supply Abdullah with cannabis. That same month, Desai drove to a location near Brighton where he sold two guns and approximately 100 rounds of ammunition to contacts there.
The next month Abdullah sourced another two pistols, one of which Desai collected from the car park of a convenience store on Thelwall New Road in Grappenhall, Warrington.
Arrest and sentencing
In March 2022, Abdullah was jailed for 12 years for conspiracy to import class A drugs. He was caught with 20 kilos of cocaine, with a street value of £1.6 million, stashed in boxes of phone accessories when police raided a joiners yard in Middleton. The drugs had been sent from Holland and showed a purity of between 70 and 73 per cent. Messages showed he was trying to sell them on and had agreed a price of £37,500 with two potential buyers.
He was under investigation for this when he was arrested for the gun crimes on March 21, 2021. Officers from the National Crime Agency (NCA) tried to stop the car he was in, but he drove off as he was instructed to get out. Following a chase, he tried to flee on foot but was eventually arrested in an alleyway on Brinsworth Drive in Cheetham Hill. Footage released by the NCA shows an officer pointing a taser at him before pushing him against a fence and down to the floor.
Abdullah pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiring to transfer a prohibited weapon at Manchester Crown Court in October 2023. He was sentenced to four years and eight months in March this year. This sentence will run consecutively to the drugs sentence he is already serving.
Desai was arrested on the A500 in Stoke-on-Trent with officers finding £2,870 in cash and a golf-ball-sized black bag of cocaine hidden inside the car's fuel cap. Desai pleaded guilty to one count of supplying class A drugs and two counts of conspiracy to transfer prohibited weapons in June this year, just before he was due to stand trial. He admitted a charge of supplying cannabis at an earlier hearing. He was sentenced yesterday (October 8) to 10 years in prison.
NCA statement and past conviction
In a statement issued after the hearing, NCA branch commander Cat McHugh said: “Abdullah and Desai nonchalantly traded in these deadly weapons. They completely disregarded the dangers posed to the public, or in whose hands the pistols could have ended up in. Their only motive was financial gain.
“Such cases show how closely linked the firearms and drugs trades are, which is why the NCA works with law enforcement partners at home and overseas to tackle the organised crime groups behind them.”
Then known as Dwaine George, Abdullah was jailed in April 2002 after teenager Daniel Dale was shot dead in Miles Platting. He was convicted of murder, attempted murder and possession of a firearm with intent to endanger life after a trial at Preston Crown Court. He maintained his innocence and analysis of his case by Cardiff University law students led to his successful appeal.
The conviction was quashed at the Court of Appeal in 2014. Presiding judge Sir Brian Leveson said the conviction was 'no longer safe' and praised the students' 'diligent' work. George was a member of the Cheetham Hill gang and was convicted on the basis of particles of gunshot residue. He appealed against the conviction in 2004, but failed on that occasion, and was released on licence from prison after 12 years.
The students were working for the Innocence Project, which was set up to represent people it believes were wrongly convicted. Mr Dale, who had never been in trouble with the police, was shot as he chatted with friends in the street in 2001. He was found collapsed in an alleyway off Farnborough Road at Miles Platting. He had been due to be called as a crown court witness over the killing of his 16-year-old friend Paul Ward, who was stabbed to death in Cheetham Hill earlier in the year.
Following his release, George told the BBC's Inside Out North West: “I partly feel responsible because it was my group of friends that was actually responsible for this murder.” Asked how he felt about friends who had let him 'rot in jail', he said: "There's definitely a sense of resentment but at the same time there was a code that we had amongst ourselves, we don't grass, it was just an expected thing, it was a norm, that's why if you did grass there would be such bad repercussions against your family, your loved ones, because it was a golden rule, and as much as now, as a mature adult, I see the fallacy of them values, they were the values that we lived by at the time."
