Lakhani made calls to arms dealer having links to Saddam

London, Aug 15: Hemant Lakhani, the arms dealer accused of plotting to sell missiles to terrorists, tried to buy weapons from countries in the former Soviet Union and made repeated telephone calls to a Keiv arms manufacturer accused of having links to Saddam Hussein, a media report said today.
The arms manufacturer, Ukrspetsexport, has been accused by Britain and the US of illegally supplying hi-tech radars to Baghdad in the build-up to the war earlier this year.
"Ukrspetsexport is an organisation that arouses deep suspicion among western security agencies," the 'evening standard' reported quoting a diplomatic source.
It also emerged today that from the moment Lakhani flew to Russia, he walked into an elaborate entrapment, set up by the Russian security services, the FSB.
They had been tipped off months earlier by the FBI and MI6, the American and British intelligence agencies respectively, that he would come.

Wherever he went he was filmed as he began an attempt to buy missiles from the remote Dyagteryov arms factory, 230 km east of Moscow, after reading about it on the internet.

David Liksman, chief engineer at the Dyagteryov factory, said, "the FSB agent who sold the IGLA missile to him posed as a representative of our plant because it's well-known we're the only source of this missile launching system."

According to the report, former business colleagues of Lakhani in England said he was little more than a "bungling chancer" who continually dreamed of getting rich through quick schemes that ended in failure.

Lakhani was arrested by FBI in the US on Tuesday.
Bureau Report >