Tag: Weapons

Via a reader tip comes this article showing the amount of illegal weapons that are seized at airports in South Korea:

Nineteen people have been caught this year trying to bring guns onto planes in Korea, a sharp increase from just one from last year.

According to Rep. Park Wan-su of the main opposition Liberty Korea Party, Monday, 25 such cases occurred at airports across the country between January 2014 and this September.

The number changed little from two in 2014 to three in 2015 and one in 2016, but it has soared at an alarming rate over the past nine months.

During that period, 25 guns, 1,368 bullets, 395 knives and 1,374 other weapons such as stun guns have been seized.

“All the nation’s airports and related institutions should beef up their security in response to an increasing number of such attempts,” Park said.

According to Rep. Park Chan-woo of the same party, 34 people were caught at Incheon International Airport trying to smuggle guns into the country between January 2012 and this August.

During that period, 2,819 illegal weapons, including 1,483 bullets and 426 knives, were seized. The lawmaker said 45.8 percent of them came from the United States.   [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link, but I wonder how many of these guns found are from people forgetting they had one packed in their bag or were they legitimately trying to smuggle it into Korea?

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 seems selling weapons to various countries in Africa is a major money maker for the Kim regime,

North Korean weapons barred by U.N. sanctions ended up in the hands of U.N. peacekeepers in Africa, a confidential report says. That incident and others in more than a half-dozen African nations show how North Korea, despite facing its toughest sanctions in decades, continues to avoid them on the world’s most impoverished continent with few repercussions.

The annual report by a U.N. panel of experts on North Korea, obtained by The Associated Press, illustrates how Pyongyang evades sanctions imposed for its nuclear and ballistic missile programs to cooperate “on a large scale,” including military training and construction, in countries from Angola to Uganda.

Among the findings was the “largest seizure of ammunition in the history of sanctions” against North Korea, with 30,000 rocket-propelled grenades found hidden under iron ore that was destined for Egypt in a cargo vessel heading toward the Suez Canal. The intended destination of the North Korean-made grenades, seized in August, was not clear.

A month before that, the report says, a U.N. member state seized an air shipment destined for a company in Eritrea containing military radio communications items. It was the second time military-related items had been caught being exported from North Korea to Eritrea “and confirms ongoing arms-related cooperation between the two countries.” Eritrea is also under U.N. sanctions for supporting armed groups in the Horn of Africa.

Discovering such evasions is challenging because Africa has the world’s lowest rate of reporting on monitoring U.N. sanctions on North Korea. Just 11 of its 54 countries turned in reports to the panel of experts last year, the U.N. report says.

“African enforcement tends to be lax,” Marcus Noland, an expert on North Korea at the Petersen Institute for International Economics, wrote last month, adding that “North Korea may deliberately target African countries as a circumvention strategy.” He said North Korea’s long military involvement in Africa, and its growing interest in trade there to reduce its deep dependence on China, “bring the continent’s relationship with North Korea into increasing conflict with tightening U.N. sanctions.”  [Associated Press]

You can read the rest at the link, but it may be time to start actively targeting these countries doing arms deals with North Korea with financial sanctions as well.

North Korea poured $3B into weapons development, equal to 3 years' worth of food https://t.co/WhhzbVqOBB

— Elizabeth Shim (@GlobalAsianista) January 7, 2016

Considering North Korea’s long defense relationship with Syria to include trying to make them a nuclear reactor, it only makes sense that ISIS would have captured plenty of North Korean manufactured weaponry:

The terror group ISIS that is effectively in charge of vast swathes of Syria and Iraq is using North Korean-made tanks and portable missiles, the website NK News claimed Monday.

It cited intelligence sources as claiming tanks used by ISIS in an attack on a Kurdish region in northern Iraq in September were Soviet T-55 tanks upgraded in North Korea, and portable missiles used by militants are of a type manufactured in the North.

Earlier, German intelligence told lawmakers that ISIS has portable surface-to-air missiles that are capable of shooting down civilian aircraft. A photo of an ISIS militant brandishing the weapon was posted on Twitter.

At the time, German intelligence believed the weapon was Russian, Bulgarian or Chinese in origin.

But NK News said ISIS got its hands on North Korean-made weapons by capturing them from government forces in Syria. The two countries maintained close ties since the 1970s and the North exported various weapons to Syria, including the upgraded T-55 tanks and portable surface-to-air missiles.  [Chosun Ilbo]

The original NK News article for those that have a subscription can be read at this link.