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Germany probes into possible arms sales to Iraq
MUNICH, Germany: Police in the western German cities of Mannheim and Cologne have opened inquiries into a German-Russian businessman suspected of masterminding the illegal supply of weapons to Iraq, weekly news magazine Focus says in its edition due out on Monday.
The businessman, named as Mark V., specialises in selling weapons from former Soviet bloc countries to the Middle East and German investigators suspect him of illegally channelling weapons to Iraq via Jordan, it said. The United Nations slapped an embargo on sales of weapons to Iraq after Baghdad invaded neighbouring Kuwait in 1990.
Mark V., who owns a dental equipment company in the northern city of Hamburg and lives most of the time in South Africa, is already known to the German secret services for having supplied arms to South Africa during the apartheid era, when such sales were banned by the United Nations, Focus said.
The latest police investigation into Mark V's affairs was triggered after they arrested Canadian businessman Arthur Andersen in Pforzheim, western Germany, in August, the weekly said. Andersen, a Russian who acquired Canadian citizenship, is suspected of breaking the law on weapons sales when he supplied European weapons to Jordan, it added. The two men were once business partners and early this year supplied Russian missiles worth 60 million dollars (euros) to Jordan. But they then became rivals, Focus said. Syria will work to lift embargo on Iraq: state media: Syria's state-run media said Sunday Damascus would make "all efforts" to ensure the international embargo imposed on Iraq since 1990 is lifted once arms inspections are completed.
"If the intentions are good, the mission of international arms inspectors to Iraq will finish quickly. It will then be possible to demand a lifting of the sanctions that have hurt the Iraqi people enormously," the Tishrin newspaper wrote.
Syria, which currently holds a seat on the United Nations Security Council, will make "all efforts possible to ensure the lifting of the unjust sanctions imposed on Iraq" since the 1991 Gulf War, the paper added.
The 15-member Security Council voted unanimously Friday to send weapons inspectors into Iraq, backed with a threat of "serious consequences" if Baghdad fails to show it has scrapped his weapons of mass destruction. Iraq has until November 15 to accept what the council called "a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations." Syrian officials and the media have made clear Damascus voted for the revised US draft resolution only after ensuring it contained no "hidden triggers" allowing for an immediate recourse to force if Iraq violated its United Nations obligations, notably on disarmament.
However, Tishrin Sunday issued a warning to the arms inspectors, who pulled out of Iraq in 1998, saying they should conduct their work in an "honest and objective manner". "The arms inspections must go ahead in an honest and objective manner. The international inspectors must be from the United Nations and not members of foreign intelligence services," it wrote, saying they must have "no relations with Israel". Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said on Saturday that Iraqi compliance with Resolution 1441 would clear the way for the lifting of the UN sanctions regime.