Two Britons jailed for selling armour piercing ammunition to SLA

[TamilNet, Thursday, 11 February 2010, 00:50 GMT]
Two Britons were jailed for 9 years and 7 years by Southwark Crown Court Judge James Wadsworth for "knowingly trading in large amounts of ammunition for totally war-like, destructive and death-dealing use, without a UK licence," BBC reported Monday. Gideon Sarig, 58, of west London and 64-year-old Howard Freckleton, of north London, were found guilty of supplying "bombs, armour-piercing ammunition and other weapons to Sri Lanka's military and Israel have been jailed," BBC said in the report.

The self-employed arms dealers sold 1,000 bombs from the Ukraine to the Sri Lankan Army in 2005 and 3,900 rounds of 30mm armour-piercing incendiary ammunition from Serbia and Montenegro to Sri Lanka between February 2005 and May 2006.

The weapons were used in Sri Lanka's "long, protracted and bloody civil war" with the Tamil Tigers, the jury was told, according to the BBC report.

An official at the Custom's specialist on military exports said that the two accused "flagrantly breached UK trade controls on the supply of military equipment between third countries, some of which were areas of armed conflict and others of which were close to such areas."

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Illegal dealers jailed over weapons sold to Sri Lanka