US in secret gun deal -Small arms shipped from Bosnia to Iraq 'go missing'

Breeze54

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Fri May-12-06 02:14 AM
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US in secret gun deal -Small arms shipped from Bosnia to Iraq 'go missing'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1773107,00.html

US in secret gun deal

Small arms shipped from Bosnia to Iraq 'go missing' as Pentagon uses dealers

Ian Traynor in Zagreb
Friday May 12, 2006
The Guardian

The Pentagon has secretly shipped tens of thousands of small arms from Bosnia to Iraq in the past two years, using a web of private companies, at least one of which is a noted arms smuggler blacklisted by Washington and the UN.

According to a report by Amnesty International, which investigated the sales, the US government arranged for the delivery of at least 200,000 Kalashnikov machine guns from Bosnia to Iraq in 2004-05. But though the weaponry was said to be for arming the fledgling Iraqi military, there is no evidence of the guns reaching their recipient.

Senior western officials in the Balkans fear that some of the guns may have fallen into the wrong hands.

A Nato official described the trade as the largest arms shipments from Bosnia since the second world war.

The official told Amnesty: "Nato has no way of monitoring the shipments once they leave Bosnia. There is no tracking mechanism to ensure they do not fall into the wrong hands. There are concerns that some of the weapons may have been siphoned off."

Snip-->
Aerocom is said to have carried 99 tonnes of Bosnian weaponry, almost entirely Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles, in four flights from the Eagle base in August 2004, even though, under pressure from the EU, the firm had just been stripped of its operating licence by the Moldovan government because of "safety and security concerns".

Amnesty said there was no available record of the guns reaching their destination.

Mr Griffiths contacted the coalition authorities in Baghdad, who denied all knowledge of any weapons purchases from Bosnia. The contracts are said to have been arranged by the military attache of the time, at the US embassy in Sarajevo. Bosnian documentation named "coalition forces in Iraq" as the end users for five arms shipments. <--Snip

:wtf:

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Vidar

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Fri May-12-06 03:14 AM
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1. Where are Ollie North & Kashoggi?

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Name removed

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Fri May-12-06 03:38 AM
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2. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

Heidi

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Fri May-12-06 03:38 AM
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3. Locking.

Duplicate: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=2278449&mesg_id=2278449

Heidi,
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