This week, Mohammad Fazeli, 27, a US citizen of Iranian extraction, pled guilty to attempting to illegally ship the sensors. He faces 10 years in jail.

Federal court documents show Fazeli and an Iranian identified as Majid Samsar conspired to buy the sensors from Gopher Electronics, a distributor of industrial electrical components. Fazeli's mission was to get the sensors from Gopher and have them shipped to his home in Los Angeles, California.

Once there, Fazeli was instructed repackage the sensors and use false shipping documents to send them to the offices of Al Turath Engineering on the 5th Floor of the Al Attar Grand Building on Khalid Bin al Waleed Street, Dubai.

According to the company's web site, Al Turath is 'one of  the nation's leading scientific and engineering consulting firms providing

world-class expertise through product development and enhancement, Architectural and structural, Mechanical, Electrical & roads design modeling and simulation, materials engineering and testing.' The company boasts 'over 24 years experience' and says it can help customers  'customers solve their technical problems'.

According to evidence presented to the court, once the sensors were received at Al Turath, Samsar would arrange to have them shipped to their real destination, a company called 'Behpajooh Inc' in Esfahan, Iran. It is not known what was to happen to the sensors after that or, if there was another client standing behind Behpajooh Inc.

The plot began on September 6, 2004, when Samsar emailed Fazeli and instructed him to purchase the Honeywell sensors, which detect pressure changes in gas or liquid. The sensors can be used to make bombs that detonate at specific altitudes

Using his American Express card, Fazeli paid $1,525.43 for the sensors on September 14, 2004.

Using a Yahoo email account of Mo_fazeli@yahoo.com, Fazeli emailed his contact, Samsar, telling him he had bought '103 PCs of the item this morning.' He later emailed Samsar to tell him he was having trouble with Gopher who had phoned him, he said, to say they couldn't ship the sensors to him without knowing where they were going. Fazeli wrote to Samsar that he had convinced Gopher the sensors would be staying in the US ‘I told them OK and it was the whole conversation,’ he wrote.

Samar told Fazeli to print out a fake commercial invoice to make it appear the sensors had not been shipped by Gopher and to declare their value as '$309 only'. Fazeli did as he was instructed an on September 29 mailed the sensors to Al Turath Engineering in Dubai.

However, the sensors were intercepted by US federal agents and, after a joint investigation by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) elite Arms and Strategic Technology Investigations team and, the FBI, Fazeli was arrested and charged.

An ICE spokesperson would not comment on what, if any, actions were currently underway against Al Turath and Majid Samsar.