-Caveat Lector-
Sierra Leone: Italian police raid Revolutionary United Front chief arms
supplier
AFP20010710000152 Freetown Concord Times (Internet Version-WWW) in English
9 Jul 01
[Unattributed article: "Italian Police Nab RUF's Chief Arms
Supplier"]
Italian police have raided the modest two-room apartment home of
Leonid Efimovich Minin, an international arms dealer and business partner
and confidant of Charles Taylor, near Milan. The raid smashed an
international arms-smuggling ring involving Russian organised crime that
has been supplying weapons to the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), reports
The Times of London.
Times reports that the raid was the culmination of months of
painstaking detective work aimed at halting the trade.
When the Squadra Mobile, or flying squad, pulled Leonid out of bed,
the Ukrainian-born, who operates under at least 30 nicknames, remained
silent and calm. He had 20 grams of cocaine on him.
Leonid, now under Italian police custody has been charged with
international arms trafficking, a crime for which he faces a sentence of up
to 12 years if convicted.
The police first started surveillance on Leonid when they were tipped
off about his arrival in Italy early last year. Arresting him last August
for drugs trafficking, they found him in the company of two prostitutes.
They confiscated £300,000 worth of diamonds and cocaine and photographs of
a variety of weapons. He was placed under house arrest and then released.
Times newspaper quotes Walter Mapelli, the public prosecutor, as
saying that the investigation focuses on two shipments of arms from eastern
European countries to Africa
- 68 tons of light weapons in March 1999 and a consignment of 113 tons last
July which included assault rifles, Russian-made rocket-propelled grenades
and ammunition.
The arms, believed to be of Ukrainian, Russian and Bulgarian origin
and including 10,500 Kalashnikov rifles, were falsely certified as destined
for African countries, including Burkina Faso, which were not subject to
the arms embargoes that the UN has slapped on Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Leonid speaks Ukrainian, Russian, English, French, German and Italian,
and is believed to have made an annual profit of about £125m from his
rackets. When they seized his mobile telephone and other belongings,
however, the police found almost no trace of phone numbers. It seemed that
Minin had been punching out the numbers of his associates from memory. He
had no computer at his disposal, only three mobile phones and a fax machine.
[Description of Source: Freetown Concord Times (Internet Version-WWW) in
English -- independent daily newspaper; root URL as of filing date:
http://www.oe-pages.com/BIZ/Homebiz/tod]
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