Fraudster Mohammed Humza’s hand grenade plot ‘doomed to fail’ in FBI sting

On-the-run conman sentenced to five years after approaching seller who was an undercover agent

Mohammed Humza was sentenced to five years in prison for trying to buy grenades online. Courtesy ERSOU Police

A convicted fraudster was sentenced to five years in prison on Friday after he tried to buy hand grenades on the dark web from an undercover FBI agent.

Mohammed Humza, 29, is believed to have fled to Pakistan to avoid trial last year after his failed attempt to buy the fragmentation grenades, potentially lethal to anyone standing within 20 metres.

He was found guilty in his absence last year by a jury of trying to buy several grenades over two months in 2016 in a doomed project after logging i on to the dark web, a hard-to-reach area of the internet used by criminals to add anonymity to illegal deals.

“He proceeded to start negotiations for the purchase of this particular grenade,” said Mrs Justice McGowan. “Unbeknown to him the person with whom he was dealing was an FBI agent and so the process was pretty well doomed to failure from the start.

“The fact is he tried to get the device and he did everything in his power to achieve that aim.”

The judge said that it appeared Humza wanted it for the purposes of “serious crime”.

The trial was told that he went on the now-closed site AlphaBay, which had a reputation for trading items including drugs and firearms.

He haggled with the agent to reduce the price of buying two grenades from $125 each to $115.

Humza was said to need explosives to break into a vault or safe but the deal did not go through after the FBI agent told him he had sold out.

AlphaBay – at one time said to be the world’s largest online seller of drugs – was later taken down by authorities. Its alleged founder Alexandre Cazes was arrested in Thailand in 2017 and was found dead in his cell days later.

Humza, who is married with three children, fled the country before the trial. Prosecutors said he was still at large.

He had already served a four-year jail sentence for stealing a Saudi Arabian sheikh’s £97,000 ($132,260) Rolls-Royce car from an underground car park in the upmarket London district of Mayfair.

The conman, from Watford, 30 kilometres north-west of London, filled in official documents to claim that he was the new owner before selling the car to a dealer for little more than a quarter of its value.