A UN report confirms that North Korea was trying to sell machine guns, mortar ammunition, and grenades to Middle Eastern countries in the past. I was going to trade about 20 different weapons, and if I add the number of ammunition for various guns to the weapon, it amounts to 40 million. Reporter Ham Ji-ha reports.
In its recently released annual report, the UN Security Council 1970 committee, which deals with sanctions on Libya, accused the North Korean Chosun Mining Development and Trading Company (KOMID) of attempting to sell arms.
The report said that in 2015, Abdul Rahman Bager, a national of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), tried to supply weapons to the UAE through the Korea Mining Development and Trading Company.
According to the list, all 24 weapons Barger requested are firearms, machine guns, mortars, rocket ammunition and grenades, and bulletproof vests.
Specifically, 20 million 12.7x108mm ammunition for machine guns, 10 million 7.62x54mm ammunition for rifles, 5,000 ammunition for semi-auto pistol ‘M92’, 30,000 120mm mortar ammunition, 40,000 107mm rocket ammunition, and 3,000 grenades , 5,000 bulletproof vests, etc.
Combined as a unit for ammunition and weapons, the total is over 38 million.
Chosun Mining Development and Trading Company is a North Korean state-run arms agency that was placed on the UN Security Council sanctions list in 2009 and has been caught several times in arms trade with Iran and Syria.
However, the report said no contract had been signed at the time, and instead said the UAE military authorities had purchased weapons from Serbia that matched 75% of the list of weapons provided to the Chosun Mining Development and Trading Company.
Next, the remaining 25% not listed on the Serbian side list was originally requested only by the Korea Mining Development and Trading Company, suggesting that 25% of these weapons could be procured only through trade with North Korea. Weapons requested only by North Korea include 107mm rocket ammunition and B-32 ammunition.
As this report deals with sanctions against Libya, it pays more attention to the fact that the weapons the UAE purchased from Serbia were later transferred to Libya rather than the situation of North Korea’s arms sales.
However, by confirming the fact that reference was made to the report of the UN Security Council’s Expert Panel on North Korea Sanctions Committee in the past, we confirmed the connection with this incident, which was known to a limited extent at the time.
Earlier, in the report issued in 2016, the Expert Panel of the North Korea Sanctions Committee included a letter from the UAE government responding to the relationship between the Chosun Mining Development and Trading Company and Bager in the appendix without mentioning specific details.
According to the report, Bager was a high-ranking executive of ‘Al-Mutlaq’, a suspected arms trading company, and had been in contact with Kim Yun-song, a North Korean national, around 2015.
In particular, considering that Kim Yun-song proposed a specific transaction, but it was not completed, it is estimated that it is the same as the ‘disabled transaction’ published in this Libyan expert panel report.
Kim Yun-song, who is believed to be an official of the Chosun Mining Development and Trading Company, was born in 1960 and was introduced as a person living in China at the time.
At that time, it was found that the panel of experts of the North Korea Sanctions Committee asked the UAE about Kim Yun-song, Jang Yong-sun, the third secretary of the North Korean embassy in Iran, and a person named ‘Ri Hyeong’, which seems to have something to do with the Chosun Mining Development and Trading Company.
In response, the UAE side presented immigration records showing the fact that Jang Yong-sun and Lee Hyung went to and from the UAE several times.
In summary, it seems that Kim Yun-song, an employee of a North Korean mining development and trading company, tried to sell arms to the UAE around 2015, but as a result, it failed to achieve its purpose.
However, through the circumstances of the transaction attempt revealed this time, it was confirmed that North Korea could directly manufacture a variety of firearms and mortar ammunition, or at least procure it from other countries.
It has been reported that North Korea has sold weapons to the Middle East and Africa several times in the past.
Although the UN Security Council completely banned North Korea’s arms trade through its resolutions on sanctions against North Korea, examples of North Korea’s attempts to sell weapons or actually succeeding are being continuously introduced through UN reports dealing with other countries’ sanctions issues.
In 2017, the UN Security Council Yemen Sanctions Committee expert panel pointed out that the Yemeni Houthi rebels were using a North Korean-made ‘Type 73 machine gun’.
The following year, the Yemeni expert panel collected remnants of short-range ballistic missiles launched by the Houthi rebels and said that the missiles were highly likely to be improved versions of North Korea’s Hwasong-6 missiles.
In addition, the UN Security Council’s “Surveillance Group” under the Somalia and Eritrea Sanctions Committee reported in its annual report in 2017 that it had found a North Korean Type 73 machine gun on a ship off the coast of Puntland in northeastern Somalia.
In addition, on a ship heading from North Korea to Eritrea, military high-frequency radios, microphones for decoding codes, GPS and high-frequency antennas were discovered, and North Korean-made pistols and ‘AK-47’ rifles were found in the Democratic Republic of Congo, causing a stir. .
This is Jiha Ham from VOA News.
