Australia: Army Link To Stolen Weaponry

Taken from The Sydney Morning Herald, December 15, 2006
Les Kennedy

ROGUE elements in the Australian military are feared to be behind the blackmarket sale of a cache of rocket launchers and guns to terrorist and criminal groups.

NSW counter-terrorism police are overseeing an investigation by the Middle Eastern Crime Squad, which is trying to locate eight of nine anti-tankweapons it suspects may have been stolen from the army for use within Australia.

The Herald can reveal that the police measures have extended to cutting a controversial deal with one of Sydney’s main underworld figures, who is in a high security prison.

The $50,000 paid to a member of the family of the Lakemba murderer Adnan ‘‘Eddie’’ Darwiche, who acted as a go-between, has so far yielded only one of the Light Anti-Tank Weapons and about 20 kilograms of explosives.

While police suspect the launcher is from the army, the serial numbers on the weapon have been filed off, complicating their investigation.

Variations of the rocket launchers – essentially light fibreglass tubes capable of firing one armour-piercing explosive – are widely used by terrorism groups overseas.

It is the suspected army link that has unnerved NSW police and federal intelligence agencies, suggesting that the underworld has found a way of bypassing elaborate border checks aimed at preventing terrorist weapons making their way into the country.

Senior police have dismissed earlier media reports about the existence of smuggled launchers of Chinese or Russian origin as being ‘‘wide of the mark’’.

Suspicion of a blackmarket military ring comes amid concern that police and security forces are ill prepared for a terrorist attack at next year’s Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit in Sydney.

This week, the director-general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, Paul O’Sullivan, warned there was ‘‘an over-arching and persistent threat of terrorism’’ surrounding events like the September APEC meeting, which will involve 20 of the world’s most powerful politicians.

NSW police staged a counterterrorism exercise on Sydney Harbour on Wednesday, stressing they would use unprecedented measures, including locking down parts of the city and deploying helicopters, bomb and dog squad units, to prevent trouble.

The $50,000 was paid to a relative of Darwiche, who was sentenced to life imprisonment last month for a double murder committed with three others during a bloody inter-family drug feud in Sydney’s south-west.

It is believed police explored a possible indemnity certificate for the go-between that would prevent him or Darwiche being prosecuted over possession of the rocket launcher and explosives.

The indemnity proposal, which foundered, would also have protected the two men from prosecution over Darwiche’s alleged knowledge of the whereabouts of another four launchers.

It was through Taskforce Gain, set up three years ago to end a bloody series of drive-by shootings involving two families, the Darwiches and Razzaks, that police first heard talk that one of the weapons had fallen into criminal hands.

It was dismissed as an urban myth until a suspect ‘‘rolled over’’, informing them of a plot by Darwiche to fire two rockets into a Razzak family gathering.

The launcher was recovered in negotiations between police and Darwiche – the latter hoping for a reduction in his double life sentence for the murders of Ziad Razzak and Mervat Nemra at a Greenacre home in 2003.

Ms Nemra was an innocent bystander. Ziad Razzak was using her home as a safe house while on the run from Darwiche and three cohorts who were also found guilty of roles in the killings.

More than 100 bullets were fired into the house where the two were sleeping – two from Russian military AK-47 assault rifles and the other matched to a M-1 machine-gun, capable of firing 30 rounds a second.

Police have not been able to find the source of the M-1, but suspect it too may have been stolen from the military. Darwiche got his relative to also give police between 18 and 20 kilograms of Power-Gel explosive that he had stockpiled for use in his war against the Razzak family.

He has never revealed how he came by it, but Power-Gel can be commercially obtained with a licence and is used in mining and by farmers to remove tree stumps when clearing paddocks.

It is also believed that before the police deal with the Darwiches was aborted, authorities at one stage offered to allow him the unprecedented use of a mobile phone while in prison. The use of such devices by inmates is banned in all jails.

The Supreme Court trial this year was told that that the dispute between Eddie Darwiche and Bilal Razzak erupted in 2001 over drug-dealing boundaries and a broken marriage between Darwiche’s sister, Khadige, and Ali Abdul-Razzak.

In August, 2003 Ali Abdul-Razzak was shot dead by three gunmen as he walked from prayers at the Lakemba mosque. His killers have not been found.

Eddie Darwiche has also been found guilty of the attempted murder of Farouk ‘‘Frank’’ Razzak and the shooting of Bilal Razzak. He is now in the Super-Max high-security prison at Goulburn and is believed to be refusing to co-operate further.

Although authorities have not been able to say which armoury the rocket came from, they have not discounted the possibility that it and the M-1 machine-gun were smuggled into Australia.

Police had hoped the $50,000 payment would lead them to the arms dealer, and, in turn, to the outstanding rockets and possible terrorist cells in possession of them.