North Korea was the supplier of a cache of defective weapons sold to Burundi’s army by a Ukrainian firm, said Western diplomats familiar with the case that has riled Burundi’s anti-corruption body.
The weapons deal with Burundi appeared to be a violation of the international ban on North Korean weapons exports, which the UN Security Council imposed on Pyongyang in June 2009 after its second nuclear test, the diplomats said on condition of anonymity.
The case involved the supply of about 60 Chinese-made .50 caliber machine guns to Burundi by a Ukrainian firm called Cranford Trading, the diplomats said.
The weapons, which were defective, were sold to the firm by North Korea, they added.
Diplomats say Pyongyang continues to try to skirt the arms embargo. Last year South Africa informed the Security Council’s sanctions committee about a seizure of North Korean arms bound for central Africa.
The expanded sanctions were aimed at cutting off North Korea’s arms sales, a vital export that was estimated to earn the destitute state more than US$1 billion a year.
Some facts about the Burundi weapons deal became known late last year when the country’s anti-corruption watchdog went public about irregularities it found. It said that the arms had been defective and that Burundi had been overcharged.
A report on a state audit of the deal concluded that Cranford Trading provided Burundi’s army defective military material with the complicity of former Burundi defense minister Germain Niyoyanka, army chief Godefroid Niyombare and his deputy Diomede Ndegeya.
The auditors’ report said that the bidding offer was US$3.075 million, while the amount in the contract was for US$3.388 million. A further US$1.186 million was paid in transport fees, even though such fees were not agreed in the contract.
The auditors concluded that the defense ministry had spent a great deal of money on defective material and recommended the prosecution of all people involved on suspicion of graft.
North Korea was not mentioned in the auditors’ report.
Several officials at Burundi’s UN mission in New York declined to comment when contacted by reporters.
“The weapons were transferred by China to North Korea, which then sold them to Cranford,” a diplomat said, adding that the official documentation for the deal had been incomplete.
“There was no certificate of origin of the weapons, which is necessary to comply with international conventions,” the diplomat added.
Another diplomat confirmed the remarks.
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
Filipino farmers like Romeo Wagayan have been left with little choice but to let their vegetables rot in the field rather than sell them at a loss, as rising oil prices linked to the Iran war drive up the cost of harvesting, labor and transport. “There’s nothing we can do,” said Wagayan, a 57-year old vegetable farmer in the northern Philippine province of Benguet. “If we harvest it, our losses only increase because of labor, transportation and packing costs. We don’t earn anything from it. That’s why we decided not to harvest at all,” he said. Soaring costs caused by the Middle East
The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims. The demolitions came after Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz called for the destruction of
RSS