Weapon smuggling

Belarus Finds Illegal Ukrainian Arms Shipments to Russia

Belarus has uncovered an illegal cross-border weapons smuggling network from Ukraine to Russia, the close Moscow ally’s top customs official has said.

Kiev's forces have been battling pro-Russian separatists in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine since 2014 in a conflict that has claimed more than 13,000 lives. Sporadic fighting continues despite a ceasefire agreement.

Belarussian security and customs agencies have shut down a smuggling channel that moved weapons, weapon parts and ammunition from Ukraine to Russia via Lithuania and Belarus, the country’s top customs official said Monday.

"The whole arsenal was seized by the security services in Russia," the official, Yury Senko, told President Alexander Lukashenko at a briefing aired on Belarussian television.

Belarus has opened three times as many criminal cases into arms smuggling in 2019 as it did in the same period last year, Senko told Lukashenko.

Weapon smuggling

Croatian Police Arrest Weapon Smugglers

Croatian police have busted a five-member criminal ring charged with having ordered a large quantity of hand guns and weapon parts online from the USA, which arrived in Croatia under false declarations at the address of the criminal ring's alleged organiser. The weapon smugglers are four Croatians aged 42, 63, 59 and 34, and a 31-year-old Dutch national, the Ministry of the Interior has said.

The USKOK anti-corruption agency has said that the five persons are under police investigation for the unlawful possession, production and procurement of weapons and explosives.

In the period from early 2018 to November 21, the suspects formed a criminal ring in the area of Split-Dalmatia County and Zagreb to acquire illegal gain by continually buying large quantities of firearms and weapon parts in the United States and selling them on the black market in Croatia.

Weapon smuggling

Austin Man Busted For Smuggling Guns, Ammo Into Mexico

An Austin man is among those accused in a scheme involving the smuggling of machine guns and ammunition into Mexico, officials at the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western Districtannounced Thursday.

Tyler Carlson, 28, of Austin; Michael Fox, 69, of Georgetown, Texas; and Tracy Garwood, 62, of Scottsdale, Ariz., were each charged with one count of conspiracy to violate multiple federal laws, including possessing and transferring unregistered machine guns and unlawfully exporting firearms to Mexico, according to the press release. Each faces up to 5 years in federal prison, officials said.

Carlson was also charged with one count of possession of an unregistered machine gun, punishable by up to 10 years in prison upon conviction. According to officials, Carlson worked with others to acquire and unlawfully smuggle 200 firearms including .50 caliber rifles and hundreds of thousands ammunition rounds to Mexico. Carlson is said to have worked Fox — a former law enforcement officer and federal firearms licensee — to illegally acquire multiple M-134G Minigun machine guns, officials said. 

Weapon smuggling

Trump administration to provide records on Obama-era gun-smuggling probe

The U.S. Justice Department has agreed to provide congressional investigators confidential records on a failed gun-trafficking operation during the Obama administration known as “Fast and Furious” that long has been criticized by Republican lawmakers.

...In an effort to build bigger cases against major gun traffickers who were selling arms to Mexican cartels, U.S. law enforcement officials elected not to prosecute lower-level offenders transporting more than 2,000 illegal guns.

The operation and its flaws became public after two of those firearms were found in Arizona at the scene of a fatal shooting of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.


In September 2012, the Justice Department’s inspector general released a report faulting 12 department employees for failures related to the operation. The report vindicated Holder, concluding he neither conceived the operation nor attempted a cover-up.

Weapon smuggling

Scandinavian Streets Awash With Arms Smuggled From Balkans

Scandinavia has seen a dramatic influx of firearms in recent years. The lion's share of the smuggled arms stems from the war-ravaged Balkans and has been used in a number of attention-grabbing cases.

After the conflicts in the Balkans receded, a large number of weapons flooded Europe's black market. Today, Scandinavia's streets are awash with "foreign" and previously unseen gun brands, such as the Serbian Zastava and Czech-Serbian Scorpion machine guns, amid an unparalleled upswing in shooting incidents.

Although the origin of the arms was not investigated in a number of cases, the Norwegian Dagbladet daily reported that arms of South and East European origin are increasingly used in gang milieus and drug trafficking. This autumn alone, a dozen of men were charged with drug offences and illegal arms procurement as a follow-up to "Operation Hunger," during which arms sales from the former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and the former Soviet Union were revealed.

Weapon smuggling

Pistols, bullets recovered from Malaysian national at Karachi airport

The Airport Security Force (ASF) on Friday recovered a large cache of arms and ammunition from a Malaysian citizen allegedly belonging to a banned terrorist organisation as he attempted to board a flight back to his homeland from Jinnah International Airport.

The 20-year-old Khairul Mohammad had arrived in Karachi a week ago, following which he travelled to Peshawar where he reportedly bought four pistols, eight magazines and bullets before having them concealed in a microwave oven and his shoes to avoid detection at the airport.

However, his stash was detected when his luggage was passed through scanners while he tried boarding a Thai Airways flight.

According to ASF sources, the suspect was handed over to intelligence agencies as they suspect he may have been abetted by facilitators in both Karachi and Peshawar.

Officials did not specify which organisation the suspect belonged to.

Weapon smuggling

A North Korean ship was seized off Egypt with a huge cache of weapons destined for a surprising buyer

Last August, a secret message was passed from Washington to Cairo warning about a mysterious vessel steaming toward the Suez Canal. The bulk freighter named Jie Shun was flying Cambodian colors but had sailed from North Korea, the warning said, with a North Korean crew and an unknown cargo shrouded by heavy tarps.

Armed with this tip, customs agents were waiting when the ship entered Egyptian waters. They swarmed the vessel and discovered, concealed under bins of iron ore, a cache of more than 30,000 rocket-propelled grenades. It was, as a United Nations report later concluded, the “largest seizure of ammunition in the history of sanctions against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”

But who were the rockets for? The Jie Shun’s final secret would take months to resolve and would yield perhaps the biggest surprise of all: The buyers were the Egyptians themselves.

Weapon smuggling

Iran Is Smuggling Increasingly Potent Weapons Into Yemen, U.S. Admiral Says

The top American admiral in the Middle East said on Monday that Iran continues to smuggle illicit weapons and technology into Yemen, stoking the civil strife there and enabling Iranian-backed rebels to fire missiles into neighboring Saudi Arabia that are more precise and far-reaching.

Iran has been repeatedly accused of providing arms helping to fuel one side of the war in Yemen, in which rebels from the country’s north, the Houthis, ousted the government from the capital of Sana in 2014.

The officer, Vice Adm. Kevin M. Donegan, said that Iran is sustaining the Houthis with an increasingly potent arsenal of anti-ship and ballistic missiles, deadly sea mines and even explosive boats that have attacked allied ships in the Red Sea or Saudi territory across Yemen’s northern border. The United States, the Yemeni government and their allies in the region have retaliated with strikes of their own and recaptured some Houthi-held coastal areas to help blunt threats to international shipping, but the peril persists, the admiral said.

Weapon smuggling

Journalist Interrogated, Fired For Story Linking CIA And Syria Weapons Flights

Investigative reporter Dilyana Gaytandzhieva authored a bombshell report for Trud Newspaper, based in Sofia, Bulgaria, which found that an Azerbaijan state airline company was regularly transporting tons of weaponry to Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Turkey under diplomatic cover as part of the CIA covert program to supply anti-Assad fighters in Syria. Those weapons, Gaytandzhieva found, ended up in the hands of ISIS and al-Qaeda terrorists in Iraq and Syria.

While it's long been understood that the US-Gulf-NATO coalition arming rebels inside Syria facilitated the rapid rise of the Islamic State as the group had steady access to a "jihadi Wal-Mart" of weapons (in the words of one former spy and British diplomat), the Trud Newspaper report is the first to provide exhaustive documentationdetailing the precise logistical chain of the weapons as they flowed from their country of origin to the battlefield in Syria and Iraq. Gaytandzhieva even traveled to Aleppo where she filmed and examined labeled weapons shipping containers held in underground jihadist storehouses.

The Bulgaria-based journalist obtained and published dozens of secret internal memos which were leaked to her by an anonymous source as part of the report. The leaked documents appear to be internal communications between the Bulgarian government and Azerbaijan's Embassy in Sofia detailing flight plans for Silk Way Airlines, which was essentially operating an "off the books" weapons transport service (not subject to inspections or tax under diplomatic cover) for the US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), Saudi Arabia, Israel, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden. 

Weapon smuggling

Feds seize weapons at port citing war exportation laws

Citing various laws prohibiting the trade of deadly weapons, federal authorities at the Port of Wilmington seized 12 rifle scopes and 18 artillery shell casings, according to disclosure documents made public in May.

The scopes, made by Trijicon Inc. and EOTech, were taken in March by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents, who valued them at more than $15,000, according to the disclosure. The unnamed shippers of the weapons attachments violated an illegal exportation of war materials law.

The artillery shell casings, valued at $500, were seized in April in violation of the Trading with the Enemy Act, among other laws.