BUB: Arms Smuggling

Jabba's through with you. He has no use for smugglers who drop their shipments at the first sign of an Imperial cruiser.

There's a gun running case going down in New York, involving an Ivory Coast army officer trying to sneak weapons in past the arms embargo.

The Ivory Coast army colonel arrived in New York on Aug. 29, and authorities say he planned to return home days later with $4 million in guns and ammunition his country purchased from a suburban Washington D.C. broker.

Instead, Col. Nguessan Yao is being held in federal custody in a Northern California jail and the broker is scheduled to appear in court next week to answer charges that the two conspired to illegally circumvent a worldwide arms embargo of violence-plagued Ivory Coast.

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Meanwhile, the US-Mexico border fiasco is escalating as the US struggles with tracking weapons being smuggled southward .

Efforts to stem the smuggling of weapons from the United States to Mexican drug cartels have been frustrated by bureaucratic infighting, a lack of training and the delayed delivery of a computer program to Mexico, according to U.S. and Mexican officials.
In the past four years, Mexico has submitted information about more than 74,000 guns seized south of the border that the government suspects were smuggled from the United States. But much of the data is so incomplete as to be useless and has not helped authorities bust the gunrunners who supply the Mexican mafias with their vast armories, officials said.

According to U.S. agents working here, Mexican prosecutors have not made a single major arms trafficking case.

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And finally, a convicting in a smuggling case, as a Chinese man is racked up for trying to smuggle SAMs into the US.

A Rosemead man was convicted Wednesday in federal court on charges connected to smuggling surface-to-air missiles into the United States, authorities said.

Yi Qing Chen, 46, was convicted on five felony counts stemming from an effort to smuggle Chinese-made QW-2 shoulder-fired missiles, the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles said.

Authorities said Chan was arrested as a result of an FBI-led undercover investigation called Operation Smoking Dragon. Chen and another man went with an FBI agent and agreed to smuggle the missiles, along with hardware to launch the weapons, according to federal prosecutors.

By: Brant