Investor's Business Daily, March 8th, 2007
Geopolitics: Was a Russian journalist killed for revealing arms sales to Syria and Iran? And is Syria preparing for war on Israel to aid Tehran if Iran's nuclear facilities are attacked?
The suspicious death of Russian journalist Ivan Safronov, who fell to his death from a fifth-floor window in Moscow last weekend, may not have been just an accident. It may have been an attempt to derail his investigation of furtive Russian arms sales to Tehran and Damascus.
Igor Yakovenko, secretary-general of the Russian journalist union SJR, told Moscow echo radio: "From what we already know, it was not a suicide," adding, "The chances it was a murder linked to the exercise of his profession are very high."
Before his death, Safronov, a former colonel, called his newspaper, the business daily Kommersant, from a major Middle East arms fair in Abu Dhabi in late February to report he had "irrefutable confirmation" about the sale of state-of-the-art Soviet Sukhoi 34 fighter-bombers and S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to Syria and S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to Iran by way of Belarus.
After Safronov returned to Moscow, he told his colleagues of the "signature by Russia and Syria of contracts for the Pantsir C1 anti-aircraft system, MIG-29 fighter jets and Iskander tactical missiles." The Russians have much to hide.
The London Sunday Telegraph reports that a British army board of inquiry into the shooting down of a royal air force Lynx Mark 7 helicopter over southern Iraq last May found it was brought down by a Russian SA14 Strella shoulder-launched missile smuggled in from Iran. Such weapons are also believed to have brought down several U.S. helicopters.
Kommersant said the latest weapons were being sold "via Belarus to avoid the West accusing Russia of arming rogue states." But that cat's well out of the bag. The Israeli Daily Haaretz reports Syria "is close to concluding a large deal with Russia to procure thousands of advanced anti-tank missiles for the Syrian army."
Damascus saw the effectiveness of these Russian-supplied, Syrian-supplied anti-tank missiles in Hezbollah's unprovoked attack on Israel last summer, in some cases penetrating the armor of Israel's vaunted Merkava Mark IV tank.
Speaking of Hezbollah, a Syrian Baath party official told World Net Daily last July that Damascus, encouraged by Israel's failure to soundly defeat the Iranian-created and supported group, was becoming a Hezbollah franchisee, forming its own similar group with the hopes of recovering the Golan Heights from Israel, a group calling itself the Front for the Liberation of the Golan Heights.
The group claimed, also last weekend, that it had conducted its first "attack," planting six mines within northern Israeli territory in the Golan. The Israeli Defense forces found the mines Saturday night and filed a complaint -- for what that's worth -- with the U.N. for its failure to police the U.N.-patrolled buffer zone between Syrian and Israeli territory.
While this seems like a harmless probe, Syria has more serious and deadly plans, according to Jill Bellamy-Dekker, an American bio-defense analyst living in Europe. She directs the Public Health Preparedness Program for the European Homeland Security Association under the French High Committee for Civil Defense.
In an interview with World Net Daily, she said: "Syria is positioned to launch a biological attack on Israel or Europe should the U.S. attack Iran." According to her, "The Syrians are embedding their biological weapons program into their commercial pharmaceuticals business and their veterinary vaccine-research facilities" to keep the program secret.
She believes Syria's objective is to mount biological warheads on its inventory of long-range missiles, and she references an April 2000 article published by Syrian Defense Minister Mustafa Talas titled "Biological (Germ) Warfare: A New and Effective Method in Modern Warfare."
Interestingly, the article was republished in a Farsi translation in Tehran. Some of the material in question may be from stockpiles trucked in from Iraq shortly before Operation Iraqi freedom.
Iran and Syria are on the move, and Czar Vladimir Putin intends to make Russia their arsenal of tyranny.
Copyright 2007 Investor's Business Daily, Inc.
