Source
US in Secret Gun Deal
By Ian Traynor
The Guardian UK
Friday 12 May 2006
Small arms shipped from Bosnia to Iraq "go missing" as Pentagon uses dealers.

The Pentagon has secretly shipped tens of thousands of small arms from Bosnia to Iraq in the past two years, using a web of private companies, at least one of which is a noted arms smuggler blacklisted by Washington and the UN

According to a report by Amnesty International, which investigated the sales, the US government arranged for the delivery of at least 200,000 Kalashnikov machine guns from Bosnia to Iraq in 2004-05. But though the weaponry was said to be for arming the fledgling Iraqi military, there is no evidence of the guns reaching their recipient.
Senior western officials in the Balkans fear that some of the guns may have fallen into the wrong hands.


Please visit the link provided for the complete story.

Source
A complex web of private firms, arms brokers and freight firms, was behind the transfer of the guns, as well as millions of rounds of ammunition, to Iraq at "bargain basement prices", according to Hugh Griffiths, Amnesty's investigator.

The Moldovan air firm which flew the cargo out of a US air base at Tuzla, north-east Bosnia, was flying without a licence. The firm, Aerocom, named in a 2003 UN investigation of the diamonds-for-guns trade in Liberia and Sierra Leone, is now defunct, but its assets and aircraft are registered with another Moldovan firm, Jet Line International.

Some of the firms used in the Pentagon sponsored deals were also engaged in illegal arms shipments from Serbia and Bosnia to Liberia and to Saddam Hussein four years ago.

"The sale, purchase, transportation and storage of the [Bosnian] weapons has been handled entirely by a complex network of private arms brokers, freight forwarders and air cargo companies operating at times illegally and subject to little or no governmental regulation," says the report.

TYR: 99 Tonnes of Guns

May 12, 2006


it's not impossible that someone just turned up with lorries, men in uniforms and vaguely official documents and drove off with a load of guns

Wikipedia: Viktor Bout


In May 2006, when 200,000 AK-47 assault rifle went missing in transit from Bosnia to Iraq, one of Bout's airlines was the carrier.

Wikipedia: Viktor Bout


Arms Dealings

Some of Bout's customers include:

* Northern Alliance (Afghanistan)
* Taliban (Afghanistan)
* Abu Sayyaf (Philippines)
* UNITA (Angola)
* US Military (United States)
* RUF (Sierra Leone)
* Charles Taylor (Liberia)

Douglas Farah: What is Russia's Real Game?

Aug 28 2006


Bout’s recent exploits in Somalia-flying in at last two IL-76 loads of weapons for the most radical, Taliban-like regime in the world-could not take place without the explicit blessing of senior Russian military intelligence officials, using allies to do the actual deals.

[---]

Russian (and Chinese) weapons sales to Iran do not happen by accident. They occur with the full knowledge that these weapons would end up with either a rogue Islamist regime or a proxy army of that regime.

The same can be said for the weapons deliveries to Somalia. Aircraft filled with tens of tons of weapons do not miraculously fall from the sky to Islamist militants bent on expanding and consolidating their regime. More such weapons are on their way, intelligence sources say. It might be time to ask who is supplying the weapons and why.