K
Kickin' Ass and Takin' Names
Guest
Let's see -- Someone in the Iraq government was about to purchase
100,000 AK-47's when the Italian police stumbled on the plot. US
command in Baghdad knew nothing about the deal. What do you guess the
weapons were headed for one or the other side in Iraq's civil war??
And I'll bet that a lot of them would be pointed at US soldiers. Then
there's the question -- what about the weapons deals that no one
caught???
One more reason to get the **** out, now.
PERUGIA, Italy (AP) -- In a hidden corner of Rome's busy Fiumicino
Airport, police dug quietly through a traveler's checked baggage,
looking for smuggled drugs. What they found instead was a catalog of
weapons, a clue to something bigger.
Their discovery led anti-Mafia investigators down a monthslong trail
of telephone and e-mail intercepts, into the midst of a huge black-
market transaction, as Iraqi and Italian partners haggled over
shipping more than 100,000 Russian-made automatic weapons into the
bloodbath of Iraq.
As the secretive, $40 million deal neared completion, Italian
authorities moved in, making arrests and breaking it up. But key
questions remain unanswered.
For one thing, The Associated Press has learned that Iraqi government
officials were involved in the deal, apparently without the knowledge
of the U.S. Baghdad command - a departure from the usual pattern of
U.S.-overseen arms purchases.
Why these officials resorted to "black" channels and where the weapons
were headed is unclear.
The purchase would merely have been the most spectacular example of
how Iraq has become a magnet for arms traffickers and a place of
vanishing weapons stockpiles and uncontrolled gun markets since the
2003 U.S. invasion and the onset of civil war.
Some guns the U.S. bought for Iraq's police and army are unaccounted
for, possibly fallen into the hands of insurgents or sectarian
militias. Meanwhile, the planned replacement of the army's AK-47s with
U.S.-made M-16s may throw more assault rifles onto the black market.
And the weapons free-for-all apparently is spilling over borders:
Turkey and Iran complain U.S.-supplied guns are flowing from Iraq to
anti-government militants on their soil.
Iraqi middlemen in the Italian deal, in intercepted e-mails, claimed
the arrangement had official American approval. A U.S. spokesman in
Baghdad denied that.
"Iraqi officials did not make MNSTC-I aware that they were making
purchases," Lt. Col. Daniel Williams of the Multi-National Security
Transition Command-Iraq (MNSTC-I), which oversees arming and training
of the Iraqi police and army, told the AP.
Operation Parabellum, the investigation led by Dario Razzi, anti-Mafia
prosecutor in this central Italian city, began in 2005 as a routine
investigation into drug trafficking by organized-crime figures,
branched out into an inquiry into arms dealing with Libya, and then
widened to Iraq.
Court documents obtained by the AP show that Razzi's break came early
last year when police monitoring one of the drug suspects covertly
opened his luggage as he left on a flight to Libya. Instead of the
expected drugs, they found helmets, bulletproof vests and the weapons
catalog.
Tapping telephones, monitoring e-mails, Razzi's investigators followed
the trail to a group of Italian businessmen, otherwise unrelated to
the drug probe, who were working to sell arms to Libya and, by late
2006, to Iraq as well, through offshore companies they set up in Malta
and Cyprus.
Four Italians have been arrested and are awaiting court indictment for
allegedly creating a criminal association and alleged arms trafficking
- trading in weapons without a government license. A fifth Italian is
being sought in Africa. In addition, 13 other Italians were arrested
on drug charges.
In the documents, Razzi describes it as "strange" that the U.S.-
supported Iraqi government would seek such weapons via the black
market.
Investigators say the prospect of an Iraq deal was raised last
November, when an Iraqi-owned trading firm e-mailed Massimo
Bettinotti, 39, owner of the Malta-based MIR Ltd., about whether MIR
could supply 100,000 AK-47 assault rifles and 10,000 machine guns "to
the Iraqi Interior Ministry," adding that "this deal is approved by
America and Iraq."
The go-between - the Al-Handal General Trading Co. in Dubai -
apparently had communicated with Bettinotti earlier about buying night
visors and had been told MIR could also procure weapons.
Al-Handal has figured in questionable dealings before, having been
identified by U.S. investigators three years ago as a "front company"
in Iraq's Oil-for-Food scandal.
The Interior Ministry's need at that point for such a massive weapons
shipment is unclear. The U.S. training command had already reported it
would arm all Interior Ministry police by the end of 2006 through its
own three-year-old program, which as of July 26 has bought 701,000
weapons for the Iraqi army and police with $237 million in U.S.
government funds.
Negotiations on the deal progressed quickly in e-mail exchanges
between the Italians and Iraqi middlemen of the al-Handal company and
its parent al-Thuraya Group. But at times the discussion turned murky
and nervous.
The Iraqis alternately indicated the Interior Ministry or "security
ministries" would be the end users. At one point, a worried Bettinotti
e-mailed, "We prefer to speak about this deal face to face and not by
e-mail."
The Italians sent several offers of various types and quantities of
rifles, with photos included. The negotiating focused on the source of
the weapons: The Iraqi middlemen said their buyer insisted they be
Russian-made, but the Italians wanted to sell AK-47s made in China,
where they had better contacts.
"We are in a hurry with this deal," an impatient Waleed Noori al-
Handal, Jordan-based general manager of the Iraqi firm, wrote the
Italians on Nov. 13 in one of the e-mails seen by AP.
He added, in apparent allusion to the shipment's clandestine nature,
"You mustn't worry if it's a problem to import these goods directly
into Iraq. We can bring the product to another country and then
transfer it to Iraq."
By December, the Italians, having found a Bulgarian broker, were
offering Russian-made goods: 50,000 AKM rifles, an improved version of
the AK-47; 50,000 AKMS rifles, the same gun with folding stock; and
5,000 PKM machine guns.
The Iraqis quibbled over the asking price, $39.7 million, but seemed
satisfied. The Italians were set for a $6.6 million profit, the court
documents show, and were already discussing air transport for the
weapons. At this point prosecutor Razzi acted, seeking an arrest
warrant from a Perugia court.
"The negotiation with Iraq is developing very quickly," he wrote the
judge.
On Feb. 12, in seven locations across Italy, police arrested the 17
men, including the four alleged arms traffickers: Bettinotti; Gianluca
Squarzolo, 39, the man whose luggage had yielded the original clue;
Ermete Moretti, 55, and Serafino Rossi, 64. If convicted, they could
be sentenced to up to 12 years in prison.
The at-large fifth man, Vittorio Dordi, 42, was believed to be in the
Democratic Republic of Congo, where he apparently is involved in the
diamond trade. Italian authorities were seeking information on him
from the African country.
In the parallel Libya case, the Italians allegedly paid two Libyan
Defense Ministry officials about $500,000 in kickbacks to speed that
transaction for Chinese-made assault rifles. It isn't known whether
such bribes were a factor in the Iraq deal. No Libyans or Iraqis are
known to have been detained in connection with the cases.
Al-Handal's operations have caught investigators' notice before. In
1996-2003, the company was involved as a broker in the kickback
scandal known as Oil for Food, the CIA says.
In that program, Iraq under U.N. economic sanctions bought food and
other necessities with U.N.-supervised oil revenues. Foreign
companies, often through intermediaries, surreptitiously kicked back
payments to officials of Saddam Hussein's Iraqi government in exchange
for such supply contracts.
Those Iraqi middlemen also engaged in "misrepresenting the origin or
final destination of goods," said the 2004 report of the CIA's Iraq
Survey Group, which investigated both Iraq's defunct advanced weapons
programs and Oil for Food.
That report also alleged that during this period Al-Handal General
Trading, from its bases in Dubai and Jordan, secretly moved
unspecified "equipment" into Iraq that was forbidden by the U.N.
sanctions.
Reached at his office in Amman, Jordan, Waleed Noori al-Handal denied
the family firm had done anything wrong in the Italian arms case.
"We don't have anything to hide," he told the AP.
Citing the names of "friends" in top U.S. military ranks in Iraq, al-
Handal said his company has fulfilled scores of supply and service
contracts for the U.S. occupation. Asked why he claimed U.S. approval
for the abortive Italian weapons purchase, he said he had a document
from the U.S. Army "that says, 'We allow al-Thuraya Group to do all
kinds of business.'"
In Baghdad, the Interior Ministry wouldn't discuss the AK-47
transaction on the record. But a senior ministry official, speaking on
condition of anonymity because of the matter's sensitivity,
acknowledged it had sought the weapons through al-Handal.
Asked about the irregular channels used, he said the ministry "doesn't
ask the supplier how these weapons are obtained."
Although this official refused to discuss details, he said "most" of
the 105,000 weapons were meant for police in Iraq's western province
of Anbar. That statement raised questions, however, since Pentagon
reports list only 161,000 trained police across all 18 of Iraq's
provinces, and say the ministry has been issued 169,280 AK-47s,
167,789 pistols and 16,398 machine guns for them and 28,000 border
police.
A July 26 Pentagon report said 20,847 other AK-47s purchased for the
Interior Ministry have not yet been delivered. Iraqi officials
complain that the U.S. supply of equipment, from bullets to uniforms,
has been slow.
A Pentagon report in June may have touched on another possible
destination for weapons obtained via secretive channels, noting that
"militia infiltration of local police remains a significant problem."
Shiite Muslim militias in Iraq's civil war have long been known to
find cover and weapons within the Interior Ministry.
In fact, in a further sign of poor controls on the flow of arms into
Iraq, a July 31 audit report by the U.S. Government Accountability
Office said the U.S. command's books don't contain records on 190,000
AK-47s and other weapons, more than half those issued in 2004-2005 to
Iraqi forces. This makes it difficult to trace weapons that may be
passed on to militias or insurgents.
The Pentagon, meanwhile, has described the Interior Ministry's
accounting of police equipment as unreliable.
Here in Italy, Razzi expressed puzzlement at the Iraqi officials'
circumvention of U.S. supply routes.
"It seems strange that a pro-Western government, supported by the U.S.
Army and other NATO countries on its own territory, would seek Russian
or Chinese weapons through questionable channels," the anti-Mafia
prosecutor wrote in seeking the arrest warrant that short-circuited
the complex deal
http://www.rawstory.com/showoutarti...ABELLUM?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
100,000 AK-47's when the Italian police stumbled on the plot. US
command in Baghdad knew nothing about the deal. What do you guess the
weapons were headed for one or the other side in Iraq's civil war??
And I'll bet that a lot of them would be pointed at US soldiers. Then
there's the question -- what about the weapons deals that no one
caught???
One more reason to get the **** out, now.
PERUGIA, Italy (AP) -- In a hidden corner of Rome's busy Fiumicino
Airport, police dug quietly through a traveler's checked baggage,
looking for smuggled drugs. What they found instead was a catalog of
weapons, a clue to something bigger.
Their discovery led anti-Mafia investigators down a monthslong trail
of telephone and e-mail intercepts, into the midst of a huge black-
market transaction, as Iraqi and Italian partners haggled over
shipping more than 100,000 Russian-made automatic weapons into the
bloodbath of Iraq.
As the secretive, $40 million deal neared completion, Italian
authorities moved in, making arrests and breaking it up. But key
questions remain unanswered.
For one thing, The Associated Press has learned that Iraqi government
officials were involved in the deal, apparently without the knowledge
of the U.S. Baghdad command - a departure from the usual pattern of
U.S.-overseen arms purchases.
Why these officials resorted to "black" channels and where the weapons
were headed is unclear.
The purchase would merely have been the most spectacular example of
how Iraq has become a magnet for arms traffickers and a place of
vanishing weapons stockpiles and uncontrolled gun markets since the
2003 U.S. invasion and the onset of civil war.
Some guns the U.S. bought for Iraq's police and army are unaccounted
for, possibly fallen into the hands of insurgents or sectarian
militias. Meanwhile, the planned replacement of the army's AK-47s with
U.S.-made M-16s may throw more assault rifles onto the black market.
And the weapons free-for-all apparently is spilling over borders:
Turkey and Iran complain U.S.-supplied guns are flowing from Iraq to
anti-government militants on their soil.
Iraqi middlemen in the Italian deal, in intercepted e-mails, claimed
the arrangement had official American approval. A U.S. spokesman in
Baghdad denied that.
"Iraqi officials did not make MNSTC-I aware that they were making
purchases," Lt. Col. Daniel Williams of the Multi-National Security
Transition Command-Iraq (MNSTC-I), which oversees arming and training
of the Iraqi police and army, told the AP.
Operation Parabellum, the investigation led by Dario Razzi, anti-Mafia
prosecutor in this central Italian city, began in 2005 as a routine
investigation into drug trafficking by organized-crime figures,
branched out into an inquiry into arms dealing with Libya, and then
widened to Iraq.
Court documents obtained by the AP show that Razzi's break came early
last year when police monitoring one of the drug suspects covertly
opened his luggage as he left on a flight to Libya. Instead of the
expected drugs, they found helmets, bulletproof vests and the weapons
catalog.
Tapping telephones, monitoring e-mails, Razzi's investigators followed
the trail to a group of Italian businessmen, otherwise unrelated to
the drug probe, who were working to sell arms to Libya and, by late
2006, to Iraq as well, through offshore companies they set up in Malta
and Cyprus.
Four Italians have been arrested and are awaiting court indictment for
allegedly creating a criminal association and alleged arms trafficking
- trading in weapons without a government license. A fifth Italian is
being sought in Africa. In addition, 13 other Italians were arrested
on drug charges.
In the documents, Razzi describes it as "strange" that the U.S.-
supported Iraqi government would seek such weapons via the black
market.
Investigators say the prospect of an Iraq deal was raised last
November, when an Iraqi-owned trading firm e-mailed Massimo
Bettinotti, 39, owner of the Malta-based MIR Ltd., about whether MIR
could supply 100,000 AK-47 assault rifles and 10,000 machine guns "to
the Iraqi Interior Ministry," adding that "this deal is approved by
America and Iraq."
The go-between - the Al-Handal General Trading Co. in Dubai -
apparently had communicated with Bettinotti earlier about buying night
visors and had been told MIR could also procure weapons.
Al-Handal has figured in questionable dealings before, having been
identified by U.S. investigators three years ago as a "front company"
in Iraq's Oil-for-Food scandal.
The Interior Ministry's need at that point for such a massive weapons
shipment is unclear. The U.S. training command had already reported it
would arm all Interior Ministry police by the end of 2006 through its
own three-year-old program, which as of July 26 has bought 701,000
weapons for the Iraqi army and police with $237 million in U.S.
government funds.
Negotiations on the deal progressed quickly in e-mail exchanges
between the Italians and Iraqi middlemen of the al-Handal company and
its parent al-Thuraya Group. But at times the discussion turned murky
and nervous.
The Iraqis alternately indicated the Interior Ministry or "security
ministries" would be the end users. At one point, a worried Bettinotti
e-mailed, "We prefer to speak about this deal face to face and not by
e-mail."
The Italians sent several offers of various types and quantities of
rifles, with photos included. The negotiating focused on the source of
the weapons: The Iraqi middlemen said their buyer insisted they be
Russian-made, but the Italians wanted to sell AK-47s made in China,
where they had better contacts.
"We are in a hurry with this deal," an impatient Waleed Noori al-
Handal, Jordan-based general manager of the Iraqi firm, wrote the
Italians on Nov. 13 in one of the e-mails seen by AP.
He added, in apparent allusion to the shipment's clandestine nature,
"You mustn't worry if it's a problem to import these goods directly
into Iraq. We can bring the product to another country and then
transfer it to Iraq."
By December, the Italians, having found a Bulgarian broker, were
offering Russian-made goods: 50,000 AKM rifles, an improved version of
the AK-47; 50,000 AKMS rifles, the same gun with folding stock; and
5,000 PKM machine guns.
The Iraqis quibbled over the asking price, $39.7 million, but seemed
satisfied. The Italians were set for a $6.6 million profit, the court
documents show, and were already discussing air transport for the
weapons. At this point prosecutor Razzi acted, seeking an arrest
warrant from a Perugia court.
"The negotiation with Iraq is developing very quickly," he wrote the
judge.
On Feb. 12, in seven locations across Italy, police arrested the 17
men, including the four alleged arms traffickers: Bettinotti; Gianluca
Squarzolo, 39, the man whose luggage had yielded the original clue;
Ermete Moretti, 55, and Serafino Rossi, 64. If convicted, they could
be sentenced to up to 12 years in prison.
The at-large fifth man, Vittorio Dordi, 42, was believed to be in the
Democratic Republic of Congo, where he apparently is involved in the
diamond trade. Italian authorities were seeking information on him
from the African country.
In the parallel Libya case, the Italians allegedly paid two Libyan
Defense Ministry officials about $500,000 in kickbacks to speed that
transaction for Chinese-made assault rifles. It isn't known whether
such bribes were a factor in the Iraq deal. No Libyans or Iraqis are
known to have been detained in connection with the cases.
Al-Handal's operations have caught investigators' notice before. In
1996-2003, the company was involved as a broker in the kickback
scandal known as Oil for Food, the CIA says.
In that program, Iraq under U.N. economic sanctions bought food and
other necessities with U.N.-supervised oil revenues. Foreign
companies, often through intermediaries, surreptitiously kicked back
payments to officials of Saddam Hussein's Iraqi government in exchange
for such supply contracts.
Those Iraqi middlemen also engaged in "misrepresenting the origin or
final destination of goods," said the 2004 report of the CIA's Iraq
Survey Group, which investigated both Iraq's defunct advanced weapons
programs and Oil for Food.
That report also alleged that during this period Al-Handal General
Trading, from its bases in Dubai and Jordan, secretly moved
unspecified "equipment" into Iraq that was forbidden by the U.N.
sanctions.
Reached at his office in Amman, Jordan, Waleed Noori al-Handal denied
the family firm had done anything wrong in the Italian arms case.
"We don't have anything to hide," he told the AP.
Citing the names of "friends" in top U.S. military ranks in Iraq, al-
Handal said his company has fulfilled scores of supply and service
contracts for the U.S. occupation. Asked why he claimed U.S. approval
for the abortive Italian weapons purchase, he said he had a document
from the U.S. Army "that says, 'We allow al-Thuraya Group to do all
kinds of business.'"
In Baghdad, the Interior Ministry wouldn't discuss the AK-47
transaction on the record. But a senior ministry official, speaking on
condition of anonymity because of the matter's sensitivity,
acknowledged it had sought the weapons through al-Handal.
Asked about the irregular channels used, he said the ministry "doesn't
ask the supplier how these weapons are obtained."
Although this official refused to discuss details, he said "most" of
the 105,000 weapons were meant for police in Iraq's western province
of Anbar. That statement raised questions, however, since Pentagon
reports list only 161,000 trained police across all 18 of Iraq's
provinces, and say the ministry has been issued 169,280 AK-47s,
167,789 pistols and 16,398 machine guns for them and 28,000 border
police.
A July 26 Pentagon report said 20,847 other AK-47s purchased for the
Interior Ministry have not yet been delivered. Iraqi officials
complain that the U.S. supply of equipment, from bullets to uniforms,
has been slow.
A Pentagon report in June may have touched on another possible
destination for weapons obtained via secretive channels, noting that
"militia infiltration of local police remains a significant problem."
Shiite Muslim militias in Iraq's civil war have long been known to
find cover and weapons within the Interior Ministry.
In fact, in a further sign of poor controls on the flow of arms into
Iraq, a July 31 audit report by the U.S. Government Accountability
Office said the U.S. command's books don't contain records on 190,000
AK-47s and other weapons, more than half those issued in 2004-2005 to
Iraqi forces. This makes it difficult to trace weapons that may be
passed on to militias or insurgents.
The Pentagon, meanwhile, has described the Interior Ministry's
accounting of police equipment as unreliable.
Here in Italy, Razzi expressed puzzlement at the Iraqi officials'
circumvention of U.S. supply routes.
"It seems strange that a pro-Western government, supported by the U.S.
Army and other NATO countries on its own territory, would seek Russian
or Chinese weapons through questionable channels," the anti-Mafia
prosecutor wrote in seeking the arrest warrant that short-circuited
the complex deal
http://www.rawstory.com/showoutarti...ABELLUM?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
