Croatia Seizes Illegal Serbian Weapons
Weapons including rocket launcher parts being smuggled in containers were seized by Croatian customs officials on Friday amid claims the arms came from Serbia.
The defense ministry confirmed to Agence France Presse the discovery of the illegal arms in the northern Adriatic port of Rijeka and said in a statement that "competent military experts were called to establish the kind of military equipment" found there.
It did not elaborate but just said the case was under the jurisdiction of Rijeka prosecutors, customs and police.
Local papers reported that the undeclared weapons, seized in Rijeka earlier this week, originated from Serbia.
They included S-8 unguided aircraft rockets as well as rocket launcher parts and solid rocket fuel, said the influential Jutarnji List daily.
The newspaper said the arms were found in several containers bound for Abu Dhabi, though the Vecernji List daily reported that the shipment was to be delivered to Sudan.
Both papers linked the weapons to major regional arms dealer Slobodan Tesic of Serbia, whose name figures on a United Nations' blacklist of traffickers who have broken an arms embargo.
But, Tesic rejected the reports as a "notorious lie".
"For the past five, seven years, I did not load anything through any Croatian port," he told Serbia's B92 radio.
Tesic has previously been connected with arms sales in Liberia, Libya, Iraq and elsewhere.
Source: Agence France Presse
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