The importance of dihydroimidazole units especially in biochemistry is recently increasing, since they are found in many biologically active compounds. 1 They are also used in organic synthesis as synthetic intermediates, 2 chiral auxiliaries, 3 and chiral ligands. 4 Therefore, several methodologies for synthesizing them have already been developed, mainly using nitriles 5 and esters 6 as the starting substrates. However, these previous methods have several drawbacks, namely ...