New York Times writes on Albanian weapons to Gadhafi

TIRANA, March 9 – The New York Times and its writer C.J. Chivers, also known in the country for his reports on Albanian Chinese-produced ammunition sent to Afghanistan in 2008, this time on Tuesday wrote about Albanian ammunition sold to the Libyan leader, Moammar Gadhafi.
He referred to an article published at the Albanian daily newspaper Shekulli in February by Gjergj Thanasi on a set of new allegations about illegal arms movements to Libya.
Shekulli’s article details the alleged shipment of a freighter’s worth of 82-millimeter mortar rounds last year from the vast Albanian government stockpiles to the port of Ras Lanuf, where fighting between Libyan rebels and Qaddafi loyalists has been under way for several days.
Chivers considered the article as “a rich view of what would appear to be Albanian complicity in dealing with known arms smugglers to move government surplus munitions to the Libyan military.”
The deal is structured in a curious fashion, because in 2010, Libya was not under international sanctions barring it from participating in the arms trade. But the article alleges that a false end-user certificate was issued, and that the deal was assembled in part under the hand of Slobodan Tesic, a Serbian arms smuggler who is subject to a United Nations travel ban for helping to arm former President Charles Taylor of Liberia, who is now facing a war crimes trial in The Hague.
Readers who closely followed coverage of the WikiLeaks release of State Department cables will recall that Mr. Tesic was the subject of a 2009 cable describing his apparent use of a front company to move arms to Yemen.
It said that “Colonel Qaddafi’s government and Mr. Tesic, with help from the Albanian Ministry of Defense’s arms kiosk, MEICO, conspired to move surplus Eastern bloc munitions to Libya, too. The report will do little to help MEICO’s reputation for corruption, arms smuggling and loose controls of the enormous stockpiles left from Albania’s decades as a cold war bunker state.”
Albania continues to run in the international media unfortunately for such corruptive cases which very easily overshadow the other articles on its paradise characteristics as a still unknown tourist spot in the world.