KB,may be there is a reason why the Gambia government is constantly harping
on the issue of terrorism, it is probably to do with such sophisticated
netw-workings that are being constantly unravelled. Who knows what role
certain personalities played in this shaddy world. I am becoming very
suspicious.

>From: Dampha Kebba <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: The Gambia and related-issues mailing list
><[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: The Company Baabaa Jobe Keeps
>Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 09:03:20 -0500
>
>Culled from the Washington Post.
>KB
>____________________________________________________________________
>
>
>By Douglas Farah
>Washington Post Foreign Service
>Tuesday, February 26, 2002; Page A01
>
>
>U.S. and European law enforcement officials say they have scored an
>important advance in their efforts to disrupt what some officials describe
>as the biggest weapons-trafficking network in the world, responsible for
>supplying the Taliban and terrorist groups from al Qaeda in Afghanistan to
>the Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, as well as rebel forces in Africa.
>
>For the past three years, U.S. intelligence agencies have covertly been
>trying to thwart the sprawling arms empire of Victor Bout, a
>formerSovietmilitary officer whose operation is based in the United Arab
>Emirates, according to U.S. and European officials. Bout's network is
>unique, U.S., British and U.N. investigators said, because of its ability
>to
>deliver sophisticated weapon systems virtually anywhere in the world.
>
>A suspected top associate of Bout's is under arrest in Belgium, and
>investigators say he is providing fresh, inside information on how the arms
>network functions.
>
>While Bout has long been suspected of supplying weapons to the Taliban,
>U.S.
>and European officials said intelligence gathered in recent months in
>Afghanistan and elsewhere has provided new details about his flights and
>deliveries in the months before the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.
>The intelligence suggests he was flying weapons into Afghanistan more
>recently than had been believed, according to U.S. and U.N. officials
>familiar with the material.
>
>Bout specialized in breaking arms embargoes around the world, according to
>four separate U.N. Security Council reports on weapons trafficking that
>were
>issued between December 2000 and last month. His activities were also
>described in interviews with U.S., British and U.N. investigators. He
>traffics almost exclusively in weapons bought in the former Soviet bloc,
>chiefly Bulgaria and Romania, according to these officials.
>
>"There are a lot of people who can deliver arms to Africa or Afghanistan,
>but you can count on one hand those who can deliver major weapons systems
>rapidly," said Lee S. Wolosky, a former National Security Council official
>who led an interagency effort to shut down Bout's operations during the
>last
>two years of the Clinton administration. "Victor Bout is at the top of that
>list."
>
>U.S. and European officials said the suspected top associate of Bout,
>Sanjivan Ruprah, was arrested in Belgium earlier this month on charges of
>criminal association and using a false passport.
>
>Before the arrest, Ruprah, a Kenyan, had secretly been in contact with U.S.
>officials in recent months, providing them with information about Bout,
>according to U.S. officials and Ruprah's attorney. The U.S. officials said
>they were given no warning Ruprah was about to be arrested by the Belgians.
>
>U.S. officials also said they had made no deal with Ruprah. They said that
>since the arrest, Ruprah has divulged more information about Bout's
>suspected arms pipeline to the Taliban, which ruled Afghanistan until last
>November, and al Qaeda, which the Taliban had sheltered there.
>
>"We are very, very interested in this case because we understand Ruprah is
>talking about the supply of weapons to al Qaeda and the Taliban," said a
>senior U.S. official. "His basic line with us was that, while he had done
>some bad things, he didn't deal with al Qaeda and he understood that being
>linked to that now would be very, very bad."
>
>Ruprah was especially valuable to Bout, U.S. and U.N. investigators said,
>because he was tied to the illicit diamond trade in West Africa andarranged
>for Bout to be paid for his weapons deliveries with diamonds from Sierra
>Leone, Congo and Angola.
>
>Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations have used an underground network
>that stretches across Africa to trade in diamonds, weapons and other
>valuable commodities.
>
>Last year both Bout and Ruprah were placed on a U.N. list of individuals
>banned from international travel because of their ties to Liberia and the
>Sierra Leone rebel movement known as the Revolutionary United Front, or
>RUF.
>
>Johan Peleman, a Belgian weapons expert who has investigated Bout for
>several years on behalf of the United Nations and has spoken regularly to
>Ruprah in recent months, said Ruprah was knowledgeable about Bout's
>financial dealings, especially in the diamond trade. Belgium is interested
>because Bout's financial network was based in Antwerp, the center of the
>world diamond trade.
>
>Ruprah's attorney, Luc de Temmerman, said in a written statement that his
>client engaged only in legal activities in Africa. While acknowledging that
>Bout and Ruprah knew each other, he said they were not in business
>together.
>
>De Temmerman said Ruprah had recently been in touch with the FBI, the CIA,
>the United Nations and British intelligence officials to provide them with
>information in an effort to have the U.N. travel ban on him lifted. He
>denied Ruprah knew anything about arms shipments to al Qaeda or the
>Taliban.
>
>The U.N. reports said Bout originally based his operations in Ostend,
>Belgium, in 1995, and moved to the UAE in 1997 when Belgian officials began
>investigating his air freight operations.
>
>The reports, compiled independently by separate groups of U.N.
>investigators
>monitoring U.N. embargoes, document Bout's shipments of hundreds of tons of
>arms to UNITA rebels in Angola, the government of President Charles Taylor
>in Liberia and several factions involved in the civil war in Congo. All are
>under U.N. weapons bans.
>
>Ruprah was identified in U.N. reports as a key intermediary between Bout
>and
>Taylor. A December 2000 report said Ruprah was issued a Liberian diplomatic
>passport in the name of Samir M. Nasr, and was identified as Liberia's
>deputy commissioner for maritime affairs.
>
>Ruprah helped arrange for three flights to Liberia in July and one in
>August
>2000, the report said, delivering two combat-capable helicopters,
>surface-to-air missiles, armored vehicles, machine guns and almost a
>million
>rounds of ammunition. The weapons originated in Bulgaria.
>
>U.S. and U.N. investigators say they believe Bout has also run guns for the
>radical Muslim Abu Sayyaf guerrilla movement in the Philippines and has
>flown weapons for Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi.
>
>"Victor Bout, as the largest player in the world in the illicit air
>logistics business, is a critical aider and abettor to criminal and
>terrorist organizations, rogue heads of state and insurgencies -- whoever
>is
>able to pay," Wolosky said.
>
>According to a U.N. Security Council report issued in April 2001, Bout is
>35
>years old. Born in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, he is a graduate of Moscow's
>Military Institute of Foreign Languages and speaks six languages fluently,
>according to the report.
>
>The report also describes Bout as a former air forceofficer who holds at
>least five passports. Investigators said Bout was known as the "Lone Wolf"
>because he operates by himself. They describe him as short, stocky and
>usually sporting a bushy mustache.
>
>Telephone calls and faxes to Bout's offices in the UAE went unanswered. An
>associate of Bout's there said all of Bout's employees in the Emirates had
>left. The associate said he no longer knew where they were. Bout's brother
>Sergei, based in Islamabad, Pakistan, also did not return phone calls.
>
>Bout has refused to talk to U.N. investigators or reporters.
>
>He has a fleet of about 60 aircraft, including large Russian cargo planes,
>according to investigators. His operation is tied together by a complex web
>of overlapping airlines, charter companies and freight-forwarding
>operations
>that give him a global reach. His main company is registered as Air Cess.
>
>In an effort to confound investigators, Bout continually changed the
>registration of his aircraft from one African country to another, all the
>while basing his air operations in Sharjah, one of seven emirates that make
>up the UAE.
>
>Bout's alleged dealings with the Taliban and al Qaeda are the subject of an
>ongoing, classified U.S. operation that began in early 2000. "There was a
>concerted effort at the tail end of the Clinton administration, continued
>into the Bush administration, to put him out of business," said one former
>U.S. official.
>
>U.N. and U.S. officials said Bout cut a deal with the Taliban in 1996 in
>UAE, one of only three countries in the world that recognized the regime.
>
>The deal called for Bout's Air Cess to supply and service Afghanistan's
>Ariana Airways and the Afghan air force, both of which used Soviet-era
>aircraft. Another company that Bout had an interest in, Flying Dolphin,
>provided charter flights from Dubai to Afghanistan, the sources said, and
>soon there were several flights a week from Dubai to the Taliban stronghold
>of Kandahar.
>
>U.N. investigators say they now believe many of those flights were loaded
>with weapons. When U.N. sanctions shut down Ariana in November 2000, Flying
>Dolphin obtained a U.N. waiver, for reasons that are not clear, and
>continued flying the Dubai-Kandahar route until being shut down by the
>United Nations in January 2001.
>
>"Bout undoubtedly did supply al Qaeda and the Taliban with arms," Peter
>Hain, Britain's minister of European affairs and lead investigator into
>Bout's global arms trade, told the Associated Press on Feb. 19.
>
>A 1998 Belgian intelligence report on Bout's activities, obtained by The
>Washington Post, says he made $50 million in Afghanistan, selling heavy
>weapons to the Taliban. However, Peleman and other investigators said they
>had doubts that Bout had earned that much money from the Taliban and al
>Qaeda, in part because Bout also supplied weapons to anti-Taliban leaders,
>some of whom were his close friends.
>
>Nonetheless, the United States launched an effort to disrupt Bout's arms
>trading, trying to freeze his assets and pressuring other nations,
>especially the UAE, to expel him. U.S. officials said they were limited in
>what they could do because they believed Bout had violated no U.S. laws.
>One
>of Bout's companies, Air Cess Inc., based in Miami, was dissolved on Sept.
>19, according to public records, and its telephone number no longer works.
>
>In late 2000 the Clinton administration asked the UAE at an "extremely high
>level" to shut down Bout's operation, a former U.S. official said. UAE
>officials reponded that they had no evidence of criminal wrongdoing by
>Bout.
>
>"We would have preferred they shut him down completely but they took
>helpful
>incremental steps that disrupted his operation," the source said, including
>imposing new and costly equipment requirements on his air fleet.
>
>When President Bush took office, the Bout project received less attention,
>U.S. officials said. Then came the Sept. 11 attacks. "Suddenly, he was back
>on our radar screen in a very significant way," a senior U.S. official
>said.
>"His importance suddenly loomed very large."
>
>
>_________________________________________________________________
>Join the world’s largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail.
>http://www.hotmail.com
>
><<//\\>>//\\<<//\\>>//\\<<//\\>>//\\<<//\\>>//\\<<//\\>>
>
>To view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface
>at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html
>To contact the List Management, please send an e-mail to:
>[log in to unmask]
>
><<//\\>>//\\<<//\\>>//\\<<//\\>>//\\<<//\\>>//\\<<//\\>>


_________________________________________________________________
MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos:
http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx

<<//\\>>//\\<<//\\>>//\\<<//\\>>//\\<<//\\>>//\\<<//\\>>

To view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface
at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html
To contact the List Management, please send an e-mail to:
[log in to unmask]

<<//\\>>//\\<<//\\>>//\\<<//\\>>//\\<<//\\>>//\\<<//\\>>