Shady dealers aim to arm Iraq

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/HG27Aa01.html

<snip>According to Washington Post reporter Doug Farah, Aerocom shared an address and telephone number in Moldova with Jetline, a company publicly named as a Bout company by then senior Pentagon official Paul Wolfowitz. But when the first Aerocom flights were made in August 2004, the airline had lost its vital air-operating certificate, issued by Moldova. The certificate expired on August 6, 2004, before the flights and has not been renewed.

Farah noted that Bout has "double-dealt with all sides of every war he has supplied. He has routinely rerouted weapons shipments for his own commercial gain, and that does not inspire much confidence. A person who can supply the Taliban and the Northern Alliance at the same time, and who has experience dealing weapons in Bosnia, would be unlikely to flinch at the thought of further weapons diversions."

The US shipments were made over a year, from July 2004, via the American Eagle base at Tuzla, and the Croatian port of Ploce by the Bosnian border.

Aerocom is said to have carried 99 tons 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 European Union, the firm had just been stripped of its operating license by the Moldovan government because of "safety and security concerns".

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