BLACK FLAGS

200,000 assault rifles 'vanish' from US hands

A 99-tonne cache of 200,000 AK47 assault rifles was to have been secretly flown out of a US base in Bosnia. But the four planeloads of arms have vanished.
Orders for the deal were given by the US Department of Defense. But the work was contracted out via a complex web of private arms traders.
American defence chiefs hired a US firm to take the guns, from the 90s Bosnian war, to Iraq.
Aerocom, the Moldovan air firm at the centre of the 200,000 missing AK47s, was stripped of its licence by its national authorities a day before the first shipment.
The same airline was blasted by the UN in 2003 for smuggling arms to Liberia.

Air traffic controllers in Baghdad have no record of the flights, which supposedly took off between July 2004 and July 2005. A coalition forces spokesman confirmed they had not received "any weapons from Bosnia" and added they were "not aware of any purchases for Iraq from Bosnia".
Two other companies in the complicated sale claim to have papers proving the guns were delivered in Iraq but refuse to show them.

[The latest incident follows a separate probe claiming that thousands of guns meant for Iraq's police and army instead went to al-Qaeda. One arms broker's lawyer admitted nearly all of a shipment of AK-47s went missing. And a US official said £270million of equipment could not be traced. ]

Deeper and deeper: arming the perpetrators

Arms transportation services to Sudan are provided by air and sea generally through foreign companies, or joint arrangements with local companies.
For example, in 2004 a Moldavian registered cargo company, Aerocom, that carried shipments of arms from Serbia to Liberia in violation of the UN embargo in 2002, was carrying cargo to Sudan in 2004 and maintained a close business link to the Ukrainian national arms export company named on Sudanese arms import documents in August 2004.
In 2003 a Sudanese air cargo company leased a Kyrgyzstan-registered Antonov cargo plane from the latest in a long line of companies run by Victor Bout, a Russian arms broker named in several UN reports for violating UN arms embargoes.
The plane is reportedly based in Sharjah and run by British Gulf International Airlines of Kyrgyzstan formed in 2003 out of a Sao Tome-registered company of the same name, using the same office and staff.