The weapons laden plane seized in Bangkoken route from North Korea at the weekend has been linked to two renowned East European arms traffickers by a respected Swedish think tank in the latest twist in the mysterious saga.
The Ilyushin-76 aircraft, which was found to be carrying 35 tons of weapons including rockets and grenades, was most recently registered under a company called Beibars, linked to Serbian arms dealer Tomislav Dmanjanovic. It had previously been registered with three companies identified by the US Department of the Treasury as firms controlled by the notorious Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, according to a researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
Hugh Griffiths, who monitors air cargo companies involved in arms trafficking for SIPRI, said other past owners of the aircraft had also been documented by the UN as trafficking arms to Liberia,Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Sudan and Chad
“The mystery surrounding this aircraft is solved,” said Mr Griffiths, whose institute is a world leader in tracking the arms trade and analysing military spending. “Now investigators know who to question to find out the ultimate destination of the weapons.”
The East European crew of the plane, which had made an unscheduled stop at Bangkok airport to refuel, are being held in custody for 12 days to give Thai police more time to investigate what seems to be the biggest bust yet in the international arms embargo against North Korea.
The five men, four from Kazakhstanand one from Belarus, have been charged with illegally possessing heavy weapons and mis-stating details of the cargo.
They had told Thai officials that their plane carried nothing more suspicious than oil-drilling equipment but a tip off from foreign intelligence services – believed to be American – led to a search of the aircraft which uncovered the weapons hoard.
UN sanctions passed in June after Pyongyang tested a nuclear warhead ban North Korea from exporting any arms except light weapons – a major blow to the arms trade which provides a major source of income to the rogue state.
Mr Dmanjanovic is a well-known arms trafficker specialising in providing weapons to rogue states, although more recently he has been working for American interests in Afghanistanand Iraq, delivering ammunition, guns, grenades and mortars to the governments of those countries, according to UN reports.
Documents obtained in 2007 by the United Nations sanctions committee and the South Eastern and Eastern Europe Clearinghouse for the Control of Small Arms and Light Weapons, a Belgrade based research centre, indicate that companies owned by Mr Damnjanovic have regularly flown weapons to regions under UN sanctions.
In 1996, a plane charted by Mr. Damnjanovic that was carrying spare parts for Libyan fighter jets crashed outside Belgrade, killing his main business partner. Weapons exports to Libyawere prohibited under United Nations sanctions at the time.
In the same year, according to the research centre’s report, millions of rounds of ammunition shipped by Mr. Damnjanovic to Rwanda were probably intended for Congo.
In 2002, Mr. Damnjanovic sent a consignment of weapons — including AK-47-type rifles, rocket launchers, antipersonnel mines and millions of rounds of ammunition — to Liberia, falsifying documents to make it appear that Nigeria was the destination, the report claims.
Viktor Bout is currently in jail in Thailand awaiting extradition to the US on arms dealing charges. Once desribed by Peter Hain, the former Foreign Office minister as a ‘merchant of death’, he also inspired the film ‘Lord of War’, the Nicolas Cage movie about the exploits of an amoral arms dealer in Africa.
The destination of the Bangkokplane remains unknown, but Mr Griffiths told the Associated Press the aircraft had been sold from Beibars to a Georgian company called Air West, illustrating how arms dealers change the ownership of a plane to avoid the law. Despite the changes, the same people keep operating in the background, he said.
“They are like flocks of migrating birds, these aircraft. They change from one company to another because the previous company has either been closed down for safety reasons or been identified in a UN trafficking report,” he said.
The plane’s country of registration had been changed to Georgian to get around European union laws which banned all cargo carriers registered in Kazakhsan, where Beibars is registered, he said. – (The Times, UK)