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| Caribbean-Latin America |
| Brazil prosecutors filed charges in May against Taurus over Yemen arms deal |
| 2016-09-07 |
| [ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] Brazilian prosecutors said on Tuesday they had charged Forjas Taurus SA, Latin America's largest gunmaker, in May for allegedly dealing with a known Yemeni arms trafficker in violation of international sanctions. Prosecutors in the southern city of Porto Alegre, near Taurus headquarters, said a judge had opened a confidential case against the company. Taurus confirmed on Monday a Rooters report that two former executives had been charged over the deal that allegedly sent arms to Yemen's civil war, but the company said it was only a concerned party in the case. Brazil’s Forjas Taurus SA, the largest weapons manufacturer in Latin America, sold guns to a known Yemeni arms trafficker who funneled them into his nation’s civil war in violation of international sanctions, according to charges in court documents reviewed by Rooters. Federal prosecutors in southern Brazil charged two former executives of Forjas Taurus in May with shipping 8,000 handguns in 2013 to Fares Mohammed Hassan Manaa, an arms smuggler active around the Horn of Africa for over a decade according to the United Nations ...an idea whose time has gone... The handguns were allegedly shipped by Taurus to Djibouti and redirected to Yemen ...an area of the Arabian Peninsula sometimes mistaken for a country. It is populated by more antagonistic tribes and factions than you can keep track of. Except for a tiny handfull of Jews everthing there is very Islamic... by Manaa, according to court documents. Alexandre Wunderlich, a lawyer for the two former Taurus export executives, Eduardo Pezzuol and Leonardo Sperry, said the accusations in the sealed indictment "do not reflect the facts of the matter." Yemen has been consumed since early last year by a brutal civil war killing thousands of people as Iran-backed Houthi ...a Zaidi Shia insurgent group operating in Yemen. They have also been referred to as the Believing Youth. Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi is said to be the spiritual leader of the group and most of the military leaders are his relatives. The Yemeni government has accused the Houthis of having ties to the Iranian government, which wouldn't suprise most of us. The group has managed to gain control over all of Saada Governorate and parts of Amran, Al Jawf and Hajjah Governorates. Its slogan is God is Great, Death to America™, Death to Israel, a curse on the Jews... hard boyz challenge the Saudi-allied legitimate government. Manaa, who served from 2011 to 2014 as governor of Sadah could not be reached for comment. It is believed that Manaa is a top Yemeni arms-dealer and businessman. In October 2009, the Yemeni government released a blacklist of arms dealers with Manaa top of the list, as part of an effort to stem the flood of weapons in the country. |
| Posted by:Fred |