|
Colombian gun-running scandal links
shady Israelis, Al-Qaeda
Trio sought for providing arms to group branded ‘terrorist’
by US
Report: 3 from Jewish state also have ties to Lebanese
and bin Laden’s network
Ed Blanche
Special to The Daily Star
BEIRUT: Guatemalan authorities this week ordered the
arrest of three Israelis for allegedly running 3,117 AK-47
assault rifles 5 million rounds of 7.62mm ammunition to
a group of right-wing Latin American paramilitaries, the
United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), which the
US State Department has branded a terrorist group and
says has links to the country’s cocaine barons.
Israeli arms dealers and mercenaries have been linked
to South American drug cartels and unsavory right-wing
regimes in the region since the 1970s, often apparently
doing the United States’ dirty work. But the latest
arms scandal has a particular resonance given President
George W. Bush’s “war on terrorism” and
Washington’s support for the Colombian government
against leftist terrorists known as the Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
The 11,000-strong AUC is also fighting the FARC. The
smuggled weapons significantly boosted the right-wingers’
ability to wage war on the leftists and to protect the
cocaine and heroin industries at a time when the Bush
administration is seeking to increase and broaden military
assistance to the Bogota government to stamp out the multi-billion-dollar
narcotics trade.
An exhaustive report on the scandal that involved Nicaragua,
Guatemala and Colombia by the General Secretariat of the
Organization of American States (OAS), obtained by The
Daily Star, links the Israeli arms dealers with Lebanese
arms brokers in West Africa allegedly involved in guns-for-diamonds
deals that helped fund Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda
network.
On Aug. 8, a Guatemalan court issued arrest warrants
for the three Israelis, Shimon Yelinek, who headed the
DIGAL S.A. arms trading company in Panama, and Ori Zoller
and Uzi Kissilevich, who own the Guatemala-based company
Grupo de Representaciones Internacionales (GIR SA), which
handled the purchase of the weapons and ammunition. They
are accused of illegally shipping the arms enough
to equip three battalions of fighters from Nicaragua,
ostensibly bound for Panama National Police Force through
a forged purchase order, to the remote fishing port of
Puerto Turbo on Colombia’s Atlantic coast on Nov.
7, 2001.
The OAS report, dated Jan. 6, 2003, identifies Zoller
as GIR SA’s owner and as a representative of Israel
Military Industries (IMI), the state-owned flagship of
Israel’s defense industry. It said he was a former
intelligence officer with the Israeli Army’s Special
Forces.
The Israeli Defense Ministry later denied that any of
the Israelis involved in the gunrunning were licensed
arms dealers. However, the highly detailed OAS report,
including testimony apparently provided by Zoller, notes
that a month after the arms had been secretly delivered
to Colombia, Zoller received two wire transfers totaling
$56,000 from the Mercantile Discount Bank of Tel Aviv
and the First International Bank of Israel in the same
city.
The report did not say if the transfers were linked to
the gunrunning, but mention of them in the context of
the scandal would indicate that OAS investigators suspect
they were.
On May 2, 2002, Spain’s EFE news agency reported
that Nicaragua’s deputy police chief, Francisco Bautista,
claimed the arms deal, although not cleared with the Panamanian
authorities, was legal and that the shipment had been
diverted “in international waters outside of Nicaragua.”
He also presented an invoice from DIGAL signed by Amran
Maor, IMI’s deputy vice-president and marketing director
for Latin America, dated May 31, 2000.
The OAS report said Kissilevich, Zoller’s partner
in GIR SA, was a former member of the Israeli military.
The report says Yelinek, based in Panama, was the actual
purchaser of the Nicaraguan weapons through GIR SA who
“appears consistently at the heart of the matter.”
The report says they were aided in acquiring the arms
from the Nicaraguan Army by its inspector-general, General
Roberto Calderon, who had done business with GIR SA since
1999. Nicaragua’s security forces have vast amounts
of surplus Soviet-era weapons left over from the Sandinistas’
war against the US-funded Contras in the 1980s.
The report says that three weeks after the arms had been
delivered to the AUC, which confirmed in June 2002 that
it had the weapons Yelinek sought to set up a second,
larger arms shipment consisting of 5,000 AK-47s and 17
million rounds of ammunition, also from the Nicaraguan
Army and using the same phony purchase order for the Panamanian
police.
But, the report adds, that operation, organized by Zoller,
was abandoned after it was learned through Calderon that
the Colombian, Panamanian and Nicaraguan intelligence
services had launched “Operation Triangle,”
described as a “sting operation” to catch the
traffickers.
Yelinek, who disappeared when the scandal broke in April
2002, was arrested on arms trafficking charges when he
flew back in Panama in mid-November 2002. As far as is
known, he remains behind bars there. The whereabouts of
Zoller and Kissilevich are not known.
The OAS report said that its investigation team had uncovered
links between Yelinek and his associates with Lebanese
arms dealers operating in Sierra Leone, one of whom is
under investigation by several governments for ties to
Al-Qaeda. The report said that Samih Osailly, a Lebanese
arrested in Belgium in June 2001, had been in contact
with Yelinek to buy arms and ammunition for the neurotically
brutal Revolutionary United Front (RUF) faction in Sierra
Leone.
This request was linked to a fax sent by Zoller at GIR
SA to Calderon on Jan. 5, 2001, listing anti-aircraft
guns, surface-to-air missiles, rocket-propelled grenades
and other weapons sought by the RUF, presumably in hopes
that he could provide them from Nicaraguan military stocks.
Osailly worked with Ibrahim Bah, a Libyan-trained former
Senegalese rebel and the principal diamond dealer with
the RUF, which illegally mines the precious stones in
Sierra Leone.
He fought in Afghanistan with the Islamic mujahideen
against Soviet forces in the 1979-89 war and later purportedly
joined Hizbullah in Lebanon where he fought against the
Israelis for some time in the 1980s. According to Western
intelligence sources, he funnels profits from dealings
in “conflict diamonds” to Hizbullah using sympathetic
Lebanese businessmen across West Africa.
Diamond industry sources say that Osailly was heavily
involved with Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, a Kenyan considered
to be a senior Al-Qaeda operative and high on the Americans’
most-wanted list. He has been linked to the August 1998
bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es Salaam
and the November 2002 attacks in Mombasa, Kenya. Osailly
has also been linked to the 1998 bombings.
The arrest of the Israelis wanted in the Colombian scandal,
should they ever stand trial, could lead to more embarrassing
revelations about their clandestine operations in Latin
American that neither Israel nor the US would like to
see the light of day.
| 
