Welsh imam jailed over £18.5m arms deal with Libyan militia

From the London Evening Standard

A bogus asylum seeker was jailed for six years at the Old Bailey after admitting his part in a massive £18.5 million arms deal to war-torn Libya while an imam at a Welsh mosque. Abdurraouf Eshati, 29, was one of 20 people arrested by armed police who stopped a lorry before it boarded a ferry at Dover.

On his mobile police found a shocking image of a man sawing through the throat of a soldier and other photos of armed activists. Eshati phone also had an electronic copy of an invoice for 1,104 tonnes of ammunition worth $28.5 million for delivery to Tobruk. Another related document on his phone concerned the chartering of a cargo jet at a cost of $250,000 to take arms to Libya.

His role was as a translator of the documents for a man known as ET, the broker of the proposed deal involving arms from a Slovenian factory. It was intended to be the second of three transactions  – the others also involving attack helicopters – but in the end it did not go through after $250,000 mysteriously went missing at Rome airport.

But Edward Brown QC, prosecuting,  said: “There can be no doubt that the cargo plan would have been used to transport goods to Libya and the ammunition would have been , and may actually have been, used in the armed conflict.”

A court order bans the reporting of full details of the planned transactions but the arms were due to be flown from Italy to Tobruk and onto the militia’s stronghold in Zintan.

Judge John Bevan QC imposed a four years and six months sentence for the terrorist charge and 18months consecurtive for the immigration offence. The judge attacked Eshati’s “facile” excuses, lies and contradictions and told him he had been a “confidante to large scale arms supply.” “Despite the complicated politics existing in Libya terrorism is terrorism,” said the judge.

Eshati was acting as an imam at the Wrexham mosque and when police raided his office there they found a forger’s kit of blank documents, assorted letterhead designs and tests of ink stamps. This proved that his asylum application had been based on bogus paperwork. . . But Mr Brown told the court that any member of one side of the bloody conflict would obviously be at risk if caught by the opposing faction and there was evidence he had lied about the personal threat and abuse he had allegedly faced