Shadowy arms deal traced to Kazakhstan

SHYMKENT, Kazakhstan (AP) — The trail of the plane busted in Thailand last month for reportedly smuggling North Korean weapons to Iran leads back to a small air-freight company housed near an old Soviet airfield on the edge of the Kazakh steppe.

The aging Russian plane’s odyssey took it through a web of companies, financiers and air cargo carriers with addresses stretching from New York through the Persian Gulf to New Zealand, an Associated Press investigation has found.

The persistence of carriers willing to ship anything anywhere for a price — even to countries under international sanctions such as Iran and North Korea — has frustrated global efforts to stem the flow of illegal arms.

Alexander Zykov, whose crew was flying the plane grounded in Bangkok, denies he had anything to do with the seized shipment of 35 tons of explosives, rocket-propelled grenades, surface-to-air missiles and other weaponry.

But family members say the plane’s pilot and crew were working for Zykov’s East Wing air-freight company when they were taken into custody. And crewmen who have worked for Zykov told The Associated Press that they have flown cargo on rattletrap Russian planes into conflict zones such as Sudan and Somalia.

They often did not know what their cargo really was, four of these crewmen said. Two of them spoke of an industry that sometimes uses falsified flight documents and skirts customs rules.

The Soviet collapse left an infrastructure of idled aircraft and pilots desperate for work, and the families of the arrested crew portrayed them as pawns in this arms trade.

Speaking from the Kazakh city of Almaty, Zykov insisted his crew wasn’t working for him at the time of the Dec. 12 weapons seizure, saying all five took an unpaid leave about two weeks before the flight. He and his wife, Svetlana Zykova, who is listed as the plane’s owner, denied any knowledge that arms were involved.

“Go find the people who ordered this flight,” Zykov told an AP reporter and hung up the phone.

The AP spent three weeks trying to do that, studying documents and talking to pilots, shippers, government officials and experts on arms trafficking. No one would take responsibility for the arms aboard the flight, which, had it not been seized, would have followed a circuitous route spanning more than 15,000 miles.

The case came to light when Bangkok police, acting on a tip, said they seized the Russian-made Ilyushin-76 cargo plane and its five-member crew — four Kazakhs and a Belarusian — after finding weapons on board.

All five have been charged with possessing arms and are in a Thai jail pending investigation.

The Russian-language flight plan names Mehrabad Airport in Tehran as the cargo’s destination. The cargo manifest lists “oil industry spare parts” of various types but no weapons.

Aerotrack Ltd. of Ukraine and the Korean General Trading Corporation of Pyongyang, North Korea, are identified as the companies responsible for the cargo.

According to a U.N. Security Council report from November 2006, a firm owned by Zykov’s wife provided the plane that carried Somali volunteers to fight alongside the Hezbollah militia against Israel during the 2006 Lebanon War.