Al Qaeda linked to rogue aviation network
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60C3E820100113TIMBUKTU, Mali (Reuters) - In early 2008, an official at the U.S. Department
of Homeland Security sent a report to his superiors detailing what he called
"the most significant development in the criminal exploitation of aircraft
since 9/11."
The document warned that a growing fleet of rogue jet aircraft was regularly
crisscrossing the Atlantic Ocean. On one end of the air route, it said, are
cocaine-producing areas in the Andes controlled by the leftist Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia. On the other are some of West Africa's most
unstable countries.
The report, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters, was ignored, and the
problem has since escalated into what security officials in several
countries describe as a global security threat.
The clandestine fleet has grown to include twin-engine turboprops, executive
jets and retired Boeing 727s that are flying multi-ton loads of cocaine and
possibly weapons to an area in Africa where factions of al Qaeda are
believed to be facilitating the smuggling of drugs to Europe, the officials
say.
Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) has been held responsible for car and
suicide bombings in Algeria and Mauritania.
Gunmen and bandits with links to AQIM have also stepped up kidnappings of
Europeans for ransom, who are then passed on to AQIM factions seeking ransom
payments.
The aircraft hopscotch across South American countries, picking up tons of
cocaine and jet fuel, officials say. They then soar across the Atlantic to
West Africa and the Sahel, where the drugs are funneled across the Sahara
Desert and into Europe.
An examination of documents and interviews with officials in the United
States and three West African nations suggest that at least 10 aircraft have
been discovered using this air route since 2006. Officials warn that many of
these aircraft were detected purely by chance. They caution that the real
number involved in the networks is likely considerably higher.
Alexandre Schmidt, regional representative for West and Central Africa for
the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, cautioned in Dakar this week that the
aviation network has expanded in the past 12 months and now likely includes
several Boeing 727 aircraft.
"When you have this high capacity for transporting drugs into West Africa,
this means that you have the capacity to transport as well other goods, so
it is definitely a threat to security anywhere in the world," said Schmidt.
The "other goods" officials are most worried about are weapons that militant
organizations can smuggle on the jet aircraft. A Boeing 727 can handle up to
10 tons of cargo.
The U.S. official who wrote the report for the Department of Homeland
Security said the al Qaeda connection was unclear at the time.
The official is a counter-narcotics aviation expert who asked to remain
anonymous as he is not authorized to speak on the record. He said he was
dismayed by the lack of attention to the matter since he wrote the report.
"You've got an established terrorist connection on this side of the
Atlantic. Now on the Africa side you have the al Qaeda connection and it's
extremely disturbing and a little bit mystifying that it's not one of the
top priorities of the government," he said.
Since the September 11 attacks, the security system for passenger air
traffic has been ratcheted up in the United States and throughout much of
the rest of the world, with the latest measures imposed just weeks ago after
a failed bomb attempt on a Detroit-bound plane on December 25.
"The bad guys have responded with their own aviation network that is out
there everyday flying loads and moving contraband," said the official, "and
the government seems to be oblivious to it."
The upshot, he said, is that militant organizations -- including groups like
the FARC and al Qaeda -- have the "power to move people and material and
contraband anywhere around the world with a couple of fuel stops."
The lucrative drug trade is already having a deleterious impact on West
African nations. Local authorities told Reuters they are increasingly
outgunned and unable to stop the smugglers.
And significantly, many experts say, the drug trafficking is bringing in
huge revenues to groups that say they are part of al Qaeda. It's swelling
not just their coffers but also their ranks, they say, as drug money is
becoming an effective recruiting tool in some of the world's most
desperately poor regions.
U.S. President Barack Obama has chided his intelligence officials for not
pooling information "to connect those dots" to prevent threats from being
realized. But these dots, scattered across two continents like flaring
traces on a radar screen, remain largely unconnected and the fleets
themselves are still flying.
THE AFRICAN CONNECTION
The deadly cocaine trade always follows the money, and its cash-flush
traffickers seek out the routes that are the mostly lightly policed.
Beset by corruption and poverty, weak countries across West Africa have
become staging platforms for transporting between 30 tons and 100 tons of
cocaine each year that ends up in Europe, according to U.N. estimates.
Drug trafficking, though on a much smaller scale, has existed here and
elsewhere on the continent since at least the late 1990s, according to local
authorities and U.S. enforcement officials.
Earlier this decade, sea interdictions were stepped up. So smugglers
developed an air fleet that is able to transport tons of cocaine from the
Andes to African nations that include Mauritania, Mali, Sierra Leone and
Guinea Bissau.What these countries have in common are numerous disused
landing strips and makeshift runways -- most without radar or police
presence. Guinea Bissau has no aviation radar at all. As fleets grew, so,
too, did the drug trade.
The DEA says all aircraft seized in West Africa had departed Venezuela. That
nation's location on the Caribbean and Atlantic seaboard of South America
makes it an ideal takeoff place for drug flights bound for Africa, they say.
A number of aircraft have been retrofitted with additional fuel tanks to
allow in-flight refueling -- a technique innovated by Mexico's drug
smugglers. (Cartel pilots there have been known to stretch an aircraft's
flight range by putting a water mattress filled with aviation fuel in the
cabin, then stacking cargoes of marijuana bundles on top to act as an
improvised fuel pump.)
Ploys used by the cartel aviators to mask the flights include fraudulent
pilot certificates, false registration documents and altered tail numbers to
steer clear of law enforcement lookout lists, investigators say. Some
aircraft have also been found without air-worthiness certificates or log
books. When smugglers are forced to abandon them, they torch them to destroy
forensic and other evidence like serial numbers.
The evidence suggests that some Africa-bound cocaine jets also file a
regional flight plan to avoid arousing suspicion from investigators. They
then subsequently change them at the last minute, confident that their
switch will go undetected.
One Gulfstream II jet, waiting with its engines running to take on 2.3 tons
of cocaine at Margarita Island in Venezuela, requested a last-minute flight
plan change to war-ravaged Sierra Leone in West Africa. It was nabbed
moments later by Venezuelan troops, the report seen by Reuters showed.
Once airborne, the planes soar to altitudes used by commercial jets. They
have little fear of interdiction as there is no long-range radar coverage
over the Atlantic. Current detection efforts by U.S. authorities, using
fixed radar and P3 aircraft, are limited to traditional Caribbean and north
Atlantic air and marine transit corridors.
The aircraft land at airports, disused runways or improvised air strips in
Africa. One bearing a false Red Cross emblem touched down without
authorization onto an unlit strip at Lungi International Airport in Sierra
Leone in 2008, according to a U.N. report.
Late last year a Boeing 727 landed on an improvised runway using the
hard-packed sand of a Tuareg camel caravan route in Mali, where local
officials said smugglers offloaded between 2 and 10 tons of cocaine before
dousing the jet with fuel and burning it after it failed to take off again.
For years, traffickers in Mexico have bribed officials to allow them to land
and offload cocaine flights at commercial airports. That's now happening in
Africa as well. In July 2008, troops in coup-prone Guinea Bissau secured
Bissau international airport to allow an unscheduled cocaine flight to land,
according to Edmundo Mendes, a director with the Judicial Police.
"When we got there, the soldiers were protecting the aircraft," said Mendes,
who tried to nab the Gulfstream II jet packed with an estimated $50 million
in cocaine but was blocked by the military.
"The soldiers verbally threatened us," he said. The cocaine was never
recovered. Just last week, Reuters photographed two aircraft at Osvaldo
Vieira International Airport in Guinea Bissau -- one had been dispatched by
traffickers from Senegal to try to repair the other, a Gulfstream II jet,
after it developed mechanical problems. Police seized the second aircraft.
FLYING BLIND
One of the clearest indications of how much this aviation network has
advanced was the discovery, on November 2, of the burned out fuselage of an
aging Boeing 727. Local authorities found it resting on its side in rolling
sands in Mali. In several ways, the use of such an aircraft marks a
significant advance for smugglers.
Boeing jetliners, like the one discovered in Mali, can fly a cargo of
several tons into remote areas. They also require a three-man crew -- a
pilot, co pilot and flight engineer, primarily to manage the complex fuel
system dating from an era before automation.
Hundreds of miles to the west, in the sultry, former Portuguese colony of
Guinea Bissau, national Interpol director Calvario Ahukharie said several
abandoned airfields, including strips used at one time by the Portuguese
military, had recently been restored by "drug mafias" for illicit flights.
"In the past, the planes coming from Latin America usually landed at Bissau
airport," Ahukharie said as a generator churned the feeble air-conditioning
in his office during one of the city's frequent blackouts.
"But now they land at airports in southern and eastern Bissau where the
judicial police have no presence."
Ahukharie said drug flights are landing at Cacine, in eastern Bissau, and
Bubaque in the Bijagos Archipelago, a chain of more than 80 islands off the
Atlantic coast. Interpol said it hears about the flights from locals,
although they have been unable to seize aircraft, citing a lack of
resources.
The drug trade, by both air and sea, has already had a devastating impact on
Guinea Bissau. A dispute over trafficking has been linked to the
assassination of the military chief of staff, General Batista Tagme Na Wai
in 2009. Hours later, the country's president, Joao Bernardo Vieira, was
hacked to death by machete in his home.
Asked how serious the issue of air trafficking remained for Guinea Bissau,
Ahukharie was unambiguous: "The problem is grave."
The situation is potentially worse in the Sahel-Sahara, where cocaine is
arriving by the ton. There it is fed into well-established overland
trafficking routes across the Sahara where government influence is limited
and where factions of al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb have become
increasingly active.
The group, previously known as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat,
is raising millions of dollars from the kidnap of Europeans.
Analysts say militants strike deals of convenience with Tuareg rebels and
smugglers of arms, cigarettes and drugs. According to a growing pattern of
evidence, the group may now be deriving hefty revenues from facilitating the
smuggling of FARC-made cocaine to the shores of Europe.
UNHOLY ALLIANCE
