Armenia Reports Arrest in Smuggling Case

AP Online
Mar 18, 2005

Armenian police have made arrests in connection with an alleged plot
uncovered by U.S. authorities to smuggle Russian military weapons into
the United States, a security official said Thursday.

Security officials would not say how many people had been arrested in
Armenia, or even when the arrests took place. But Grach Arutyunian,
first deputy of the National Security Service, said one of the
suspects in the United States, Artur Solomonyan, has lived in America
since he became an exchange student in 1998.

The security service said Wednesday that Solomonyan has been wanted by
police in Armenia since 2001 on suspicion of avoiding military
service.

Earlier this week, U.S. authorities announced they had charged 18
people in the scheme. The arrests resulted from a yearlong
investigation in which an FBI informant posed as an arms buyer who
claimed to have ties to al-Qaida.

The informant, an explosives expert, contacted the FBI after he was
approached by a man who said he had access to weapons from the former
Soviet Union and believed the informant could find a willing buyer,
federal prosecutors said.

Using a digital camera, members of the ring, which included Armenians
and South Africans, provided pictures of the weapons they said they
had available for sale, prosecutors said.

The pictures, apparently taken somewhere in Armenia, showed anti-tank
missiles, a Russian missile launcher and an anti-tank rifle, among
other weapons, officials said.

According to a criminal complaint unsealed in U.S. District Court in
Manhattan, the informant met two of the defendants, Artur Solomonyan
and Christiaan Dewet Spies, on several occasions in New York to
discuss the weapons deals.

Solomonyan, an Armenian citizen living in New York and Los Angeles,
and Spies, a South African citizen living in New York, were arrested
Monday night at a Manhattan hotel after meeting one last time with the
informant to finalize their plans before leaving the country to obtain
the weapons, prosecutors alleged.