LA VOZ DE AZTLAN
Los Angeles, Alta California
August 7, 2007

Did over 100,000 missing USA AK-47s end up in Venezuela?

At about the same time that former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld condemned Hugo Chavez of Venezuela for purchasing 100,000 AK-47 assault rifles, the Daily Mirror of Northern Ireland reported that a 99-ton cache of AK47s that was secretly flown out from a U.S. base in Bosnia to Iraq vanished. The deal was put together by the U.S. Department of Defense and was contracted out to a complex web of private arms traders. Allegedly the planes used to fly out the AK-47's were registered to Aerocom, a company controlled by the fugitive Russian arms dealer Victor Blunt. Aerocom in turn had connections to Kellogg Brown & Root which is owned by Halliburton, a Texas-based company with connections to Vice President Dick Cheney.

Amnesty International chief spokesman Mike Blakemore said: "It's unbelievable that no one can account for 200,000 assault rifles. If these weapons have gone missing it's a terrifying prospect." American defense chiefs hired an American firm to take the guns from the Bosnian war, to Iraq, however, flights, which supposedly took off between July 2004 and July 2005 were not recorded by air traffic controllers in Baghdad.

A spokesman for the coalition forces confirmed they had not received "any weapons from Bosnia" and added they were "not aware of any purchases for Iraq from Bosnia". NATO and U.S. officials have already voiced fears that Bosnian arms - initially sold by US, British and Swiss firms - are being passed to insurgents.

A NATO spokesman said: "There's no tracking mechanism to ensure they don't fall into the wrong hands. There are concerns that some may have been siphoned off."

Two other companies in the complicated sale claim to have papers proving the guns were delivered in Iraq but refuse to show them.