Soldiers jailed for selling smuggled Iraq weapons

Soldiers jailed for selling smuggled Iraq weapons
Martin Wainwright
Saturday November 24, 2007
The Guardian

Two soldiers who smuggled stolen guns out of Iraq to sell as souvenirs were jailed at a court martial yesterday.

The lance corporals from the Yorkshire Regiment drew up a homemade catalogue of the black market weapons which are thought to have been smuggled out of Iraq in the fuel tanks of trucks and armoured cars. Their plan was to make money from easy sales to colleagues in a battalion which, according to evidence at the court martial in Catterick barracks, North Yorkshire, was "riddled with drug abuse and dealing" at the time of the incident three years ago.

Lance Corporal Michael White, 28, was sentenced to 10 years and Lance Corporal Anthony Creswick, 25, to nine and a half, for selling six pistols bought from criminals in Basra.
Their unit, the first battalion of the then Duke Of Wellington's Regiment, served in Basra between October 2004 and April 2005 when the deals were done. The panel of six officers and senior NCOs heard that the scam was referred to in code as a "business arrangement" with White called the "frontman" and Creswick the "quartermaster".

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White, who admitted taking cocaine as payment for two pistols, was the main prosecution witness in the case. Judge Advocate Colin Burn told him that peddling weapons within a military compound was "just about as serious as it gets".