Six South Asian arms dealers who paid undercover customs agents in Maryland hundreds of thousands of dollars to ship restricted, high-tech weapons to rebels in Sri Lanka and the Indonesian Army have been arrested by federal authorities in Guam, officials said yesterday.
The elaborate sting operation took center stage in Baltimore this summer, where federal agents put up a Singapore arms broker at a four-star Inner Harbor hotel, arranged for him to attend religious services at a mosque in Laurel and took him to a shooting range in Harford County so he could test-fire machine guns they said he was interested in illegally buying.
The ruse, authorities said, led representatives for the Tamil Tigers insurgents in Sri Lanka to deposit $700,000 with undercover agents as a down payment for millions of dollars in sniper rifles, submachine guns and grenade launchers. The arms dealers also inquired about unmanned air vehicles and buying surface-to-air missiles to shoot down Israeli-built aircraft in Sri Lanka, according to federal court papers.
Yesterday's announcement once again highlighted how attractive Maryland appears to be to arms dealers who want to buy banned state-of-the-art weapons in a state rich with defense contractors. Officials said they have stepped up enforcement, pointing out that the original tip in the case was handled by a military technology task force set up by federal and local law enforcement in 2002 to root out those who attempt to export arms illegally.
Last month, FBI agents searched the office of a Cumberland physician who is president of a Sri Lankan charitable organization suspected of funneling money to the Tamil Tigers. Officials said yesterday that the two cases are unrelated.
"It's our commitment to make sure we do everything we can not only to make sure that terrorists don't attack us in the United States, but terrorists do not find any support here in the United States for their activities overseas," Maryland U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein said at a news conference yesterday.
Federal prosecutors charged all six defendants - Haniffa Bin Osman, 55, of Singapore; Thirunavukarasu Varatharasa, 36, of Sri Lanka; and Erick Wotulo, 60, Haji Subandi, 69, Reinhard Rusli, 34, and Helmi Soedirdja, 33, of Indonesia - with conspiracy to export arms and munitions.
Osman, Wotulo and Subandi were also accused of money laundering and conspiring to provide material support to a terrorist organization.
