The Jamestown Foundation’s Terrorism Monitor has a very interesting indeed report on Sierra Leone, diamonds, the curious connections with political Islam of various more or less violent kinds, and our favourite subject – mystery jets!
Regular readers may recall that this blog has gone into the bizarre case of why Iraqi Airways’s planes are registered in the 9L- registry, Sierra Leone, in some detail. Specifically it’s because all the planes come from a group of related firms around Teebah Airlines in Jordan, which is the effort of an Iraqi tribal sheikh who was also involved in paying bribes to Australian officials for oil-for-food contracts, Phoenix Aviation/AVE in Sharjah, Dolphin Air (ex-Flying Dolphin, ex-Santa Cruz Imperial) of same location and extensive notoriety, and two companies (Star Air and Air Leone) run by Paddy McKay, a colourful aviation identity who worked for Tim Spicer in Sierra Leone’s civil war. It’s complicated, but this post, and this one, would be a good place to start.
All of these have nontrivial connections with each other and various Viktor Bout entities. Apparently, if local press reports are worth anything…some of the wilder suggestions about VB may be true.
Similar to most states in Africa, Sierra Leone struggles with endemic corruption at all levels of society, especially at the governmental level. [TYR: You bet your arse it does.] The most recent case of the government’s collusion with individuals linked to terrorist groups involves a British national named Paddy McKay, who is wanted in the UK for alleged involvement with al-Qaeda. [TYR: Is he now? That’s new.] According to a report in the Freetown Peep, Paddy McKay with the help of Khalil Lakish, a Sierra Leonean of Lebanese descent who is also under investigation for bribery of government officials and ties to Hezbollah, obtained Sierra Leonean registrations for four planes with fraudulent information. The planes [TYR: The serial numbers, you fool! What are the serial numbers?] have since been tied to terrorist activity. According to two separate reports in The Independent and the Freetown Peep, McKay, who they allege also has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Algeria’s Jamaat al-Islamia, has been using the Sierra Leonean registered planes to traffic illicit diamonds and distribute weapons to the Middle East and the Horn of Africa.
I have my doubts about some of this, especially the Egyptian MB bit, but it’s surely interesting. Apparently much of this is based on an AFP wire story drawn from the Freetown press. AFP, famously, don’t want you to read their stuff, so much so that they won’t let Google index it. Their website is head-bleedingly user-hating, too, with plenty of “You know, and I know, we won’t read this” forms, no search function, no archives, and precious little content.
It appeared on the 22nd of December 2004, though.
Update: Paddy McKay speaks. Read his response here.