EXCLUSIVE | 

Kinahan cartel used tiny Iranian island to launder dirty money and for holidays

It is understood that Christy Kinahan discovered Kish when he was first travelling in the Gulf

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Officers from America’s Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) following the trail of the Kinahan wealth have discovered how they used a tiny island off Iran known as the ‘Pearl of the Persian Gulf’ to wash and move their dirty money.

Kish Island is part of Iran but has much more relaxed laws than on the mainland and is a bustling tourist destination for wealthy Middle Eastern visitors.

It is also a free trade zone with lax banking practices, which have made it attractive to the top end of organised crime.

The tiny island is even in the process of having ATM machines installed which will allow crypto currency be transferred into cash.

It is understood that Christy Kinahan discovered Kish when he was first travelling in the Gulf – but that Daniel Kinahan has also used it for business and pleasure and often holidayed there in recent years.

Kish is known as Iran’s Costa Del Sol and while women have to wear headscarves and traditional costumes, the paradise island has a more European feel, with drink served in hotels and restaurants and a huge coral beach for snorkelling.

Officers investigating Kinahan Cartel links to Iran and to the Hezbollah terror group suspect that they were providing money laundering services for the two threats to US security.

The looming spectre of Iran and the Kinahan links to it has been present since connections were made between the group and the Dutch criminal Naoufal Fassih, who was discovered hiding out in a safe house in Dublin in 2016.

Fassih was wanted in connection with a number of gangland murders in Holland, including that of Mohammad Samadi who was an Iranian who had been sentenced to death by Tehran but who was living in the Netherlands. He’d been accused of being behind a 1981 bombing that killed 73 people.

Detectives investigating the murder were convinced that it was a political assassination and that Fassih had carried it out for Tehran after the Kinahan group were asked to find a shooter.

Further investigations found that the Kinahans and other criminals based in Dubai had been using the Hawala underground banking system – which was an informal way of transferring money but which was also directly funding Hezbollah, who got a cut from every transfer.

Christy Kinahan Snr was also discovered trying to buy Egyptian military planes for his own ambitions to take over the transport route to Africa but in a detail which the DEA suspect was beneficial to Iran.

Christy Kinahan Snr, in particular, is understood to have become very political and radical in his thinking in recent years.

Social media postings under the name Christopher Vincent showed him to be anti vaccine, pro Putin and anti big pharma, while he had regularly shown an interest in troubled regions like Yemen.

A massive investigation into the Kinahan organisation and it’s funds discovered in recent years that Kish was the focal point of a lot of financial activity by the group.