North Korea sold more than 10,000 automatic rifles and other arms to the Philippines' largest Muslim guerrilla group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, in 1999 and 2000, a leading Japanese daily reported Monday. In addition, investigations by Southeast Asian nations' security authorities show that the MILF told North Korea in June 1999 that it wanted to buy a North Korean mini-submarine, the Yomiuri Shimbun said in a dispatch from Jakarta. Quoting sources among the security authorities of unidentified Southeastern Asian nations, the daily said the arms deals -- mostly taking place in Malaysia -- came to light as a result of documents the authorities confiscated from the MILF in November 2004.
In mid-1999, a North Korean businessman named Rim Kyu Do (phonetic) reportedly signed a contract with the MILF's vice chairman for political affairs, Ghazali Jaafar, to sell 10,000 U.S. military M-16 rifles, grenades as well as other types of arms and arms components for a total of $2.2 million. On Sept. 25, 1999, the MILF, which reportedly has close ties with the terrorist group al-Qaida, paid a total of $1 million to North Korea in the form of two checks through a Malaysian middleman as the initial payment for the weapons, the daily said. The weapons were shipped to MILF-controlled areas in the southern Philippine Mindanao Island by the end of December 2000 through a third country that appears to be Malaysia, it said. |