Trio Accused of Buying High-Powered Rifle For Mexican Drug Cartel at North Texas Gun Store
Excerpt:
Three men, including two Californians, are in federal custody charged with using cash to buy a military-style rifle. Authorities say a Mexican cartel was the true buyer.
The newest site for gun traffickers to buy high-powered rifles is a store off the Sam Rayburn Tollway in The Colony, police say. It’s a building that could be mistaken for a medical clinic, and it sits between a furniture store and a burger and beer joint. RifleGear is in the middle of Dallas-Fort Worth suburbia.
In January, three men walked into the gun store carrying thousands of dollars in cash. They were trying to buy weapons with enough firepower to invade a small city, according to federal court documents.
One of the men, Ghaith Alagele, 39, flew to DFW International Airport from his home near Riverside, Calif, to oversee the purchases, federal agents said. He was accompanied by a Dallas acquaintance, Mustafa Shaker, 35. A third man, Oliver Vielman-Solis, was allegedly planning to transport the weapons to Arizona. A confidential informant also was there.
Alagele and Shaker, who spoke Arabic to each other, wanted to buy at least four M249S assault rifles. The semiautomatic weapon, a civilian version of the military M249 SAW light machine gun, is belt fed and can fire rounds as fast as the user can pull the trigger. Stringing belts of ammo together, with the ability to swap out overheated barrels, allows users to fire continuously until they run out of ammo.
Undercover agents monitored the transaction. When the men left, the agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives nabbed them. They were arrested on charges of making a firearms straw purchase — essentially illegally buying guns on behalf of someone else. It’s a tactic commonly used by Mexican drug cartels to subvert background check laws and buy guns in smaller quantities to avoid suspicion from law enforcement.
Agents searched Shaker’s tow truck parked near the gun store and found $66,700 in cash wrapped in a raincoat in the back seat, court records show.
The rifle is increasingly popular in Mexico’s drug cartel wars that lead to clashes with Mexican police and military forces. The North Texas case is notable because it represents an escalation in the firepower that cartels are seeking to buy in Texas gun stores. U.S. residents are increasingly buying high-powered assault rifles for Mexican gangsters — a trend ATF recently warned gun sellers about. U.S. authorities have stepped up enforcement near the Mexican border and reported a significant increase last year in the seizure of firearms attempted to be smuggled into Mexico.
The enforcement is pushing illicit arms dealers into North Texas, ATF said.
The men, two Iraqi immigrants and a Guatemalan, are in custody awaiting trial on charges of straw purchasing of firearms, and conspiracy to acquire a firearm from a licensed dealer by false or fictitious statement.
Straw purchases are common. The Justice Department doesn’t publish statistics on the crime, but The Washington Post has reported DOJ pursued about 300 such cases in 2019 and 2020.
Last year, a federal law took effect criminalizing straw purchases. Previously, it was a paper offense — essentially lying on a form.
The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act that President Joe Biden signed into law in June 2022 created the federal straw purchasing criminal offense, carrying a penalty of up to 15 years in prison......
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With Muslim names the defendants could be planning terrorism instead of selling to cartels or using cartels as intermediaries to get them to terrorist groups. But say it’s a straw man purchase for the cartels, the latest boogieman for the DEA/DOJ/ATF, to deflect from what is happening here and to avoid asking if islamic terrorism was on the menu.
Great post and likely only a small part of what goes on in the background. Bigger question: will the Biden crime family actually prosecute these terrorists or just let them go?
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/illegal-immigrant-can-carry-guns-federal-judge-5609497
An illegal immigrant was wrongly banned from possessing guns, according to a recent ruling.
From the link:
A federal law, Section 922 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code, bars illegal immigrants from carrying guns or ammunition.
Prosecutors charged Heriberto Carbajal-Flores, the illegal alien, in 2020 after he was found in Chicago carrying a semi-automatic pistol despite “knowing he was an alien illegally and unlawfully in the United States.”
U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman rejected two motions to dismiss, but the third motion, based on a 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, triggered the dismissal of the case on March 8.
:: With Muslim names the defendants could be planning terrorism instead of selling to cartels or using cartels as intermediaries to get them to terrorist groups. ::
And to think, illegal entrants can now own guns.
What could go wrong?
Sounds pretty assaulty.
You make good points.
Revolution by Father Alberto Reyes, a priest of the Archdiocese of Camagüey, Cuba March 17, 2024
I have been thinking about questions I would ask as a nation:
What more do you want from me, Cuban Revolution? You seduced me many years ago, hypnotized me with lies, blinded me with dreams of joy, promises of freedom and justice. And I believed you, I surrendered to you, and I gave you everything: youth, efforts, sacrifices, even my family, my children.
But you were just lying, and while you smiled at me and encouraged me with words of progress, you slowly stripped me of everything, leaving me in the shameful nakedness of my broken present: a life in lies.
You broke my wings, kidnapped my dreams, dimmed my gaze, condemned my future, silenced my grievances. You distanced me from God and dried up my soul, and fueled by speeches of apparent altruism, you urged me towards violence, exclusion, and disdain: a life in hatred.
But I started waking up, amidst a thousand resistances, surrounded by fears, haunted by the inevitable awareness of my defenselessness, and protected as much as possible by deceit, by compliant simulation, by the internalized spirit of self-imposed slavery: a life of masks.
And now what, what more do you want from me? What more when I have nothing left to offer but fragments of a life that is not life?
I live among ruins, filth, and misery, burdened by scarce food and health irreversibly breaking down. I am encircled by uncertainty, loneliness filled with memories of those who departed, and fear, the fear of dying in chains and the fear of rising and breaking them; the fear, which you so skillfully wove into my soul, through violence, prisons, beatings, complicit informants who also live in fear.
What more do you want from me, Cuban Revolution? Now that no one believes in your speeches anymore, now that no one desires or loves you anymore, now when you walk the streets and you too are afraid because you have not left a single honest ally, and you know you can no longer trust anyone because you taught us so well to hide the truth with complicit gestures, that now even you are unable to recognize what lies behind a smile, behind a pledge of loyalty.
What more do you want from me, Cuban Revolution? How much more are you going to tear from me, to lead a life that is also not life, because you too live in suspicion, in alertness, in calculation, in constant need for punishment? And that, that is anything but life.
I don’t know what more you could want from me, but I do know what I want for myself: I want my dreams, I want the sparkle in my eyes, I want my confiscated wings, I want to be able to decide in my present and choose the paths of the future. I want your chains off my body and soul. And I want to embrace the God you stole from me, the only one who can make me capable, in freedom and in bidding you farewell, of forgiving you.