58,000 AKs in a Nottingham basement?
What was a small British company doing importing vast quantities of arms from Bosnia? More importantly, what was it doing telling lies about their destination in order to clear Bosnian customs? What was it doing contracting with Tomislav Damjanovic, possibly Viktor Bout, and disgraced Iraqi minister Ziad Cattan to ship them to Iraq when the Bosnian government export licence stated specifically that they would be shipped to the UK?
TYR has obtained some interesting documents through a NATO source that shed light on these fascinating questions. Everyone’s now heard of the famous 99 tonnes of AKs that were exported from Bosnia aboard Aerocom and Jet Line International Ilyushin 76 aircraft towards Iraq, but which apparently never arrived in the Iraqi army’s arsenal. But there was much more activity in the arms export business from the former Yugoslavia back then; for instance, Damjanovic was also in on a KBR-managed contract to ship weapons from Bosnia to the US Army training team in Georgia, and so was Viktor Bout, as the weapons travelled in GST Aero’s Il-76 UN-76009.
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TYR can reveal that some of the guns did indeed make it to Britain; perhaps a large percentage of the total. The 300 M84 machine guns detailed in the PMS documents were shipped, as detailed on the waybill, direct from Bosnia to Iraq in defiance of the end-user certificate; but much more may have passed through British hands. After all, some 7,639 pallets of "surplus weapons" also left Bosnia for PMS, travelling via the port of Ploce and the ship Sloman Traveller to Immingham docks in Lincolnshire.
Read in full: The Yorkshire Ranter | 58,000 AKs in a Nottingham basement?
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