Southeast Asian states lack the legal framework to stop the illicit dual-use trade.
On the evening of Monday, August 15, 2014, an Iranian national named Parviz Khaki suffered a massive heart attack while in his Manila prison cell and died shortly thereafter. Khaki, a trader and international businessman, was in detention for alleged export control violations: In May 2012, he was indicted by a U.S. court for allegedly supplying dual-use goods to Iran’s nuclear program, and was quickly arrested by Filipino authorities. For more than two years thereafter, Khaki had been in detention while Iran’s embassy in Manila fought American attempts to extradite him to the U.S.
Barely six months after Khaki’s arrest, Filipino authorities detained another foreigner suspected of involvement in supplying Iran’s illicit programs: a thirty-year-old Austrian national, Daniel Frosch, who U.S. authorities had reportedly sought since 2005 for his alleged involvement in selling missile parts to Iran. Unlike Khaki, though, Frosch did not languish in jail. Frosch’s passport had expired and he was immediately extradited to Austria, where prosecutors laid charges against him for fraud-related offences and breaches of Austria’s federal trade legislation.
While their outcomes differed dramatically, the cases of Parviz Khaki and Daniel Frosch are both evidence of an emerging problem for the Philippines – that it could have inadvertently become a hub for illicit, proliferation‑related trade.
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