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By Ellen Wulfhorst
NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. authorities arrested three people on Tuesday in a sting operation that foiled a plot to smuggle a missile into the United States that could be used to shoot down a commercial airliner, officials said.
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One suspect, a British citizen, was arrested in Newark, New Jersey, trying to smuggle the Russian-made surface-to-air missile into the country. Two others were arrested in New York, officials in Washington said.
The Briton believed he was selling missiles to would-be terrorists, but he was nabbed in the international sting by the FBI (news - web sites), British and Russian authorities, officials said.
The British Broadcasting Corporation, which first reported the story with ABC News, said the suspect was a British arms dealer who successfully imported a Russian Igla missile into the United States and believed he was selling it to a Muslim extremist.
The buyer was in fact an undercover FBI agent and the arms dealer's voice is heard on tape saying he wanted the missile to be used to shoot down a large passenger plane. The FBI said it knew the missile, disguised as medical equipment, was shipped from Russia to Baltimore, Maryland, the BBC reported.
Officials at the FBI in New York and in Newark did not return calls seeking comment on the report.
The arms dealer, first spotted five months ago in St. Petersburg and Moscow, flew to New York with his wife on Sunday on a British Airways flight from London. He was followed by an FBI agent and arrested in New Jersey after he collected a package marked "medical supplies," the BBC said.
The man is an established arms dealer, thought to be a middle-aged man of Indian origin, who lives in London, it said.
In November 2002 two shoulder-launched missiles were fired at an Israeli passenger plane taking off from Mombasa, Kenya, but did not hit the aircraft.
Defense expert John Pike called the Igla a "Russian version of the Stinger," referring to the small U.S. shoulder-launched missile designed for attacking aircraft at low altitude -- possibly during take-off or landing.
Pike said the Igla was an improved version of earlier Russian-made surface-to-air missiles and would have a better chance of bringing down a passenger jet than its predecessors.
"It has a longer range and a more sophisticated heat-seeking sensor on it," said Pike, the director of GlobalSecurity.org, a non-profit defense policy group based in suburban Washington.
New York Sen. Charles Schumer (news, bio, voting record) said the incident illustrated the need for the U.S. Homeland Security Department to speed up its two-year plan to develop a missile defense prototype for commercial airplanes.
"The threat facing commercial airliners from shoulder-fired missiles here in the United States is no longer theoretical," Schumer said in a statement.
"The White House ought to be providing homeland security with the money it needs to begin protecting civilian aircraft with jamming devices immediately, before it's too late." (additional reporting by Greg Frost in Boston and Deborah Charles in Washington)