Tag: Egypt

It is pretty amazing that the Egyptians had the nerve to accept $300 million in military aid from the United States and then turn around purchase $23 million in contraband arms from the North Koreans:

Last August, a secret message was passed from Washington to Cairo warning about a mysterious vessel steaming toward the Suez Canal. The bulk freighter named Jie Shun was flying Cambodian colors but had sailed from North Korea, the warning said, with a North Korean crew and an unknown cargo shrouded by heavy tarps.

Armed with this tip, customs agents were waiting when the ship entered Egyptian waters. They swarmed the vessel and discovered, concealed under bins of iron ore, a cache of more than 30,000 rocket-propelled grenades. It was, as a United Nations report later concluded, the “largest seizure of ammunition in the history of sanctions against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”

But who were the rockets for? The Jie Shun’s final secret would take months to resolve and would yield perhaps the biggest surprise of all: The buyers were the Egyptians themselves.

A U.N. investigation uncovered a complex arrangement in which Egyptian business executives ordered millions of dollars worth of North Korean rockets for the country’s military while also taking pains to keep the transaction hidden, according to U.S. officials and Western diplomats familiar with the findings. The incident, many details of which were never publicly revealed, prompted the latest in a series of intense, if private, U.S. complaints over Egyptian efforts to obtain banned military hardware from Pyongyang, the officials said.  [Washington Post]

I recommend reading the whole thing at the link since it is a long, but interesting read about North Korea’s history of selling illicit weapons.

It looks like the Trump administration was able to get one less client of North Korea’s arms sales.  The Egyptians in the past have bought ballistic missiles from the North Koreans:

Egypt’s defense minister, on a visit to Seoul, announced that his country has cut military ties with North Korea, according to a report by South Korea’s Yonhap news agency.

There was no immediate confirmation from the Egyptian government of the agency’s report, but Cairo has come under mounting pressure in recent weeks to sever ties with North Korea as the United States seek to curb Pyongyang’s efforts to develop long-range nuclear weapons.

Last month Washington cut or delayed nearly $300 million in aid to Egypt over its human rights record and its ties with Pyongyang.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read more at the link.

In this photo taken on Oct. 1, 2015, a monument to the 1943 Cairo Declaration on Japan’s unconditional surrender and Korea’s independence stands at the Mena House Hotel in the Egyptian capital after it was unveiled during a ceremony, organized by the South Korean Embassy there. The monument has a central part of the declaration, issued by U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Chinese President Chiang Kai-shek, inscribed that reads, “Korea shall become free and independent.” The embassy held the event to mark the 20th anniversary of establishing diplomatic ties between South Korea and Egypt, and the 70th anniversary of Korea’s independence from Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula. It also turned a spotlight on the declaration’s historic value. (Yonhap)