US to obscure arms exports after Pentagon ‘pipeline’ to Syri

Those old enough to remember when President Clinton's penis was a big news item will also remember the "Peace Dividend," that the world was going to be able to cash now that that nasty cold war was over. But guess what? Those spies didn't want to come in from the Cold, so while the planet is heating up, the political environment is dropping to sub-zero temperatures. It's deja vu all over again.

Re: US to obscure arms exports after Pentagon ‘pipeline’ to

Postby admin » Fri Jan 05, 2018 2:04 am

The Beginning of Ammunition Production Trial in Uzići
by Ministry of Defence, Republic of Serbia
January 7, 2017

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The President of the Republic of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, Minister of Defence Aleksandar Vulin, Minister of Labour, Employment, Veteran and Social Affairs, Zoran Đorđević and the Chief of General Staff of Serbian Armed Forces, General Ljubiša Diković attended today the opening of trial production in the Factory of Small Arms Ammunition Belom in Uzići near Požega.

The President of the Republic with his associates, accompanied by Director of Jugoimport SDPR, Jugoslav Petković, representatives of the Ministry of Defence and Serbian Armed Forces, local authorities and defence industries directors toured the plant in which the trial production starts, as well as the plant for water purification and ballistic tunnel for the ammunition testing.

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During the press release, the President stated that on that day, everybody had an opportunity to see how, after 14 months, one of the most beautiful and modern factories of Serbian defence industry emerged from nothing, from “meadows and woods”.

47 people are employed today, and by the end of the year 255 will be working, and by the end of the second phase, there will be 470 of them
– Vučić stated and explained that Belgian experts were still installing the equipment and that the work would last until the end of the year when 7.62mm and 9 mm calibres are in question, and with special machines for calibre 12.7mm.

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After visiting ballistic tunnel, the President expressed his belief that the factory in Uzići would mean a lot for Požega, and for defence industry of Serbia as well.

I would like to remind you that back in 2012, defence industry employed 8000 people, and today the number is 11 300, while by the end of the year this sector will employ 12 000 workers – the President said and reminded that the overall export in 2012 was 154 million US dollars, while today it amounts to 484 million and “we will not be satisfied with envisaged 750 million for the end of 2020, but we expect it to be over a billion”.

The President announced that a lot was yet to be done, particularly in defence industry of Serbia but according to his belief the capacities of the factory will not suffice so that the investments into new plants would continue in the future.

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Even if we had constructed 5 times larger capacities here, we could have sold everything, since demand is great; however, we have not mastered the technology of machines yet, the equipment is expensive and here the costs were more than 70 million euros, but each employee will produce around 500 000 pieces of small calibre ammunition per year, which is in line with the highest European standards when it comes to automation and robotisation along with the least use of labour – President Vučić stated adding that in spite of that, a significant number of people would be hired in the new factory, which would generate great profit since the entire production was sold in advance.

Regarding defence industry, he announced “new ideas for propellant charge” in Utva from Pančevo, as well as the new plans for Kraljevo which are under discussion with foreign investors, and that soon enough the National Assembly would adopt a law enabling than cooperation.

These are all good news, the market is big and defence industry will expand, and we have to make progress in order to maintain our security and safety, and because we want to make greater profit the President said and repeated that, in Uzići, we would produce around 100 million pieces of small calibre ammunition and at least 12 million pieces of 12mm calibre.

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The small arms ammunition factory, after the first phase of construction, that is going to be completed by November this year, will consist of 19 facilities of the overall gross area of 9 thousand square metres, where 103 million pieces of ammunition of 7.62 and 9mm calibre will be produced of the total value of 26.2 million euros.

The investment value of the construction works in the first phase amounts to 16.4 million euros, and of technological equipment 17.2 million euros. The total value of the investment in the factory is 91.2 million euros.
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Re: US to obscure arms exports after Pentagon ‘pipeline’ to

Postby admin » Fri Jan 05, 2018 2:11 am

Tirana Offloads Ancient Arms to Controversial Broker
by Lindita Cela, Ivan Angelovski, Maria Cheresheva
Balkan Arms Trade: Making a Killing
March 31, 2017

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Albania sold part of its vast stockpiles of aging weapons and ammunition to a controversial Bulgarian firm linked to a deadly explosion which killed a Pentagon contractor.

Albania’s state-owned arms broker sold 17.5million Chinese-made bullets, 350 mortars, and 40,000 mortar shells in 2015 to Alguns Ltd, a Bulgarian firm which worked on Washington’s programme to train and equip Syrian rebels.

The firm has been linked to a fatal explosion at a shooting range in Bulgaria in 2015 which left a Pentagon contractor working on the Syrian project dead.

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US officials training Syrian rebels in Jordan
Photo: Youtube


Alguns Ltd is owned by Alexander Dimitrov, a former business partner of Bulgarian organised crime figure Boyan Petrakiev Borisov, nicknamed ‘the Baron’ [see "Organised crime links" box].

Details of the sales, worth in excess of 1 million euros, are revealed in confidential arms export documents obtained by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN.

Organised crime links

Alguns’ owner Alexander Dimitrov is also a former business partner of the notorious Bulgarian organised crime figure Boyan Petrakiev Borisov, known as ‘the Baron’.

Documents from Bulgaria’s business registry show that Dimitrov founded Alguns Ltd in 2008 in Sofia. The company’s main activity is arms trading.

In 2004, Dimitrov and Petrakiev were joint owner of a scrap metal firm named SIB Metal.

Dimitrov says that the registration of the firm was cancelled during the application process and that he has not seen Petrakiev since.

In a report by the Ministry of Interior’s Centre for Police Research, Petrakiev is given as an example of an “established figure in the criminal world”.

The document, published in 2010, goes on to note that Petrakiev had been sentenced ten times for unnamed offences and faced a further eight cases for a wide range of crimes. Among these were stealing cars, hooliganism, rape, illegal possession of arms and drugs and participation in an organised criminal group.

In 2009, Petrakiev was found guilty of leading a criminal group involved with card skimming across eight countries, the report notes.

In 2012, he was arrested and jailed for running an illegal casino.


These show how the aging Chinese and Albanian made arms and ammunition were exported to Bulgaria as part of four export licences signed between the state-owned Military Export Import Company of Albania, MEICO, and Alguns in 2015.

At the same time, Alguns was employed as a subcontractor for the Pentagon’s US Special Operations Command, SOCOM, as part of its attempts to supply and train Syrian rebels fighting Islamic State.

Arms experts believe that Bulgaria is unlikely to have been the final destination for the equipment given its age and the fact that Bulgaria has a relatively modern army which is part of NATO. Alguns has declined to comment on expert analysis that countries in the Middle East or Africa were likely recipients.

Alguns linked to deadly blast

Alguns’s role in the Syria programme first emerged in June 2015 when 41-year-old US Navy veteran Francis Norwillo died as a rocket-propelled grenade exploded at a firing range in the village of Anevo, central Bulgaria. The venue is owned by the state-owned arms producer VMZ Sopot.

Emails and contracts obtained by BIRN from a US lawsuit and sources in Bulgaria reveal fresh details about the incident.

Alguns’s involvement in the blast remains hotly contested, but it is not disputed that the company was central in organising sessions at the range in the preceding days.

Norwillo and his injured colleague, Michael Dougherty, had been hired through a $28-million Pentagon contract to train Syrian rebels to fire various Soviet-style weapons. They had travelled to Belarus and then Bulgaria to test the equipment ahead of a training camp in Jordan, according to a lawsuit filed in Florida by Norwillo’s widow and Dougherty.

Court papers against the three US firms allegedly involved in the incident – Purple Shovel, Skybridge Tactical and Regulus Global – detail how the claimants believe the faulty grenade was more than 30 years old, of Bulgarian origin and had been rejected as unsafe by the Pentagon, which was also looking to source ammunition for the Syrian rebels.

Following the tragedy, the Bulgarian authorities identified Alguns as having rented the firing range and providing the faulty rocket.

The firm was fined its 62 500 euros in September 2015 for failing to obtain a permit from the Ministry of the Economy of Bulgaria for the fatal session, but Alguns, which denies the allegations, was later cleared on appeal.

The court ruled the ministry had made significant administrative errors and had failed to prove Alguns had rented the firing range on the day of the accident.

Purple Shovel, the Pentagon’s main contractor on the project, told BIRN in a written statement that Alguns had been brought in by Regulus Global, one of its sub-contractors, to book the sessions and provide the ammunition for the training. It said, however, that the accident took place during a “recreational shoot” at the weekend, after official training had finished.

A timetable of the training obtained by BIRN shows that Alguns had booked the firing range up until Friday, June 5, and also reveals that two Bulgarian state-owned companies, VMZ Sopot and Arcus, were in charge of training the US contractors in a variety of Soviet-style weapons and ammunition.

In a written statement, Arcus denied any involvement in the training despite being named in the contract for the event obtained by BIRN.

This included the type of rocket-propelled grenade, OG-7, which malfunctioned, causing the deadly blast.

Skybridge Tactical, which had hired Norwillo and Dougherty for the job, argues in court papers that the explosion occurred during official training, and that the injured parties should be in line for US government compensation as a result.

Regulus Global has dismissed the allegations as lacking in detail.

This incident is not Alguns only brush with the law. The firm was fined 1,000 euros in June 2016 for failing to provide proper documentation related to an ammunition store it maintains in Sliven, southern Bulgaria.

Arms’ final destination ‘Middle East or Africa’

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War in the Middle East has sparked an unprecedented flow of arms and ammunition from the Balkans, with Bulgaria playing an important role as a source of weapons and hub for arms brokers.

Asked about the Alguns’ buy-up of Albania’s aging stockpiles, Pieter Wezeman of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a leading source of information on arms transfers, believes it is unlikely Bulgaria was the final destination for the munitions given its age.

He said this equipment would likely have ended up in Syria, Yemen or perhaps Africa.

“There are several possible scenarios,” Wezeman explained. “One is that this goes to Syria or Yemen. Another is that some corrupt officials in Africa buy it as part of a fraudulent scheme. Surplus weapons do quite well in Africa for legitimate exports, although corruption is often suspected.”

SOCOM did not respond directly to questions on whether it had purchased Chinese ammunition from Albania as part of its Syrian programme, saying only that reporters should “speak with Alguns about their activities”.

US firms are banned from buying Chinese ammunition, unless a special dispensation from the State Department is obtained.

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Aging Albanian mortar shells
Photo: NATO


Alguns refused to explain what it had done with the equipment once it had arrived in Bulgaria.

Purple Shovel told BIRN in a written statement that it has “never knowingly purchased Chinese equipment or components” and “has never done business with Allguns [sic] directly”.

Tirana has a troubled track record with arms exports from its large stockpiles of Chinese ammunitions, supplied in the 1960s and 70s when Beijing was Albania’s main military backer during communist rule.

In 2007, Florida-based arms broker AEY sold millions of aging, Chinese-made cartridges to the Pentagon for use in Afghanistan. The bullets had been repackaged in cardboard boxes to look as if they had been produced in Albania in order to sidestep a ban on munitions from China. The firm’s owner, Efraim Diveroli, was given a four year jail sentence for the fraud in 2011.

And in 2011, 800,000 rounds of Chinese ammunition which were due to be delivered from Albania to the United Arab Emirates were illegally diverted to Libyan rebels.

Albania’s Ministry of Defence said that Alguns had provided the correct documents to export the weapons to Bulgaria and that it had verified the firm was “not involved in criminal activity”. It added that any re-export of the ammunition required their consent, although it is widely documented that this clause is often not fulfilled.

Alguns ties to Albania appear to go beyond buying up aging ammunition as it also sought to secure a lease to a communist-era weapons factory in the small Albanian town of Polican. But in a written statement given to BIRN, it said it had dropped the plan.

NOTE: This article has been amended on April 6 to include a comment from Arcus, a Bulgarian state-owned arms producer.

This investigation was produced by BIRN in cooperation with OCCRP as a part of Paper Trail to Better Governance project.
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Re: US to obscure arms exports after Pentagon ‘pipeline’ to

Postby admin » Fri Jan 05, 2018 4:44 am

Strongest attacks on Syrian Army come from where opposition & US forces stationed – Russian MoD
by rt.com
Published time: 19 Sep, 2017 14:23
Edited time: 20 Sep, 2017 07:19

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The Syrian Army liberating the Deir ez-Zor region from terrorists is facing strong resistance and massive fire from areas where armed opposition groups and US forces are stationed, the Russian Defense Ministry said.

The Syrian Army continues to liberate the Euphrates valley to the east of Deir ez-Zor with the help of the Russian Air Force, the statement from the ministry says, adding that the government forces have already retaken more than 60 square kilometers on the left bank of the Euphrates from Islamic State (IS, former ISIS/ISIL).

The Syrian Army, however, faces resistance not only from jihadists, but also apparently from US-backed armed opposition groups, according to the statement.

“According to the reports of the Syrian Army commanders, the most vicious counterattacks and massive shelling are launched from the northern [part of the region] controlled by the ‘Syrian Democratic Forces’ (SDF) and the US special forces that were deployed to the area to allegedly ‘lend medical assistance’ to these militants instead of liberating Raqqa,” the Russian Defense Ministry’s spokesman, Major General Igor Konashenkov, said.




He added that the Syrian Army also faced difficulties as it cut across the Euphrates River, where the water level surprisingly rose within several hours. Such water-level changes could only be the result of a deliberate flush at the dams that are also currently controlled by the armed groups backed by the US-led coalition, the major general said.

RT

@RT_com
Syrian troops cross #Euphrates as they advance east of #DeirezZor https://on.rt.com/8nk5
4:05 AM - Sep 19, 2017


“As the final defeat of Islamic State [IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL] in Syria draws near, it becomes increasingly more evident who really fights Islamic State and who just imitates a fight for three years,” he said. “Even if the US-led coalition is not willing to fight terrorism in Syria, it should at least not prevent those who really do that consistently and effectively [from fighting terrorist groups].”

The eastern Syrian city of Deir ez-Zor was besieged by Islamic State for about three years. The blockade was lifted in early September by Syrian government forces, which brought relief to tens of thousands of people trapped in the city.

However, the liberation of Deir ez-Zor also intensified the race between legitimate Syrian government forces and the US-backed SDF umbrella group for control the oil-rich Deir ez-Zor province.

Following Damascus’ strategic victory, and while its forces continue to mop up pockets of IS resistance in the west of the city, the US-backed SDF announced a separate offensive east of Deir ez-Zor. SDF forces raced to Deir ez-Zor, which lies only 140km southeast of Raqqa, where the US-led coalition is conducting its main offensive against IS.

RT

@RT_com
US-backed forces on collision course with Syrian Army in ‘race for Deir ez-Zor oilfields’ https://on.rt.com/8myb
5:40 AM - Sep 12, 2017
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