![]() ![]() Of particular concern are portable surface-to-air missiles (MANPADS), widely available in poorly-secured Gaddafi-era arsenals, which could pose a potential threat to civilian airliners. Working across eight countries in North Africa, West Africa and the Middle East, CAR initially set out to track the cross-border diffusion of Libya’s weapons stocks since the 2011 overthrow of the Gadhafi regime, a project funded by the UK government. Two examples from the greater Sahel region show the potential of this approach. Meanwhile, CAR hopes that policymakers and risk managers will also use the data in aggregate to red-flag locations, intermediaries and specific end-users which present particular diversion risks for future exports – and to target interdiction efforts on such ‘choke points.’ ITrace thereby aims to complement formal weapons tracing through the International Tracing Instrument, INTERPOL’s iArms dataset and other tracing programmes. The technology can thus help investigators to identify the possible origins, users and diversion points of a seized weapon, even when the records of its production, original export or theft are unavailable, or have been destroyed. This is done by finding weapons with similar technical characteristics, corresponding batch and serial numbers, or similar transfer histories. ITrace is applying this technology to conventional weapons for the first time, allowing users to match a seized or illicit weapon with ‘matching’ weapons documented across the world. It allows investigators, for example, to connect the construction and components of a bomb found in one place with those in another, identifying potential links between bomb-makers and bombers internationally. The technology developed from Scotland Yard’s UK Police National Bomb Data Centre, aimed at improving investigations of terrorist attacks by organising and sharing data on incidents. Second, CAR has created a unique database called iTrace, using DFuze technology that many law enforcement agencies have used to track and compare physical data from bombs and improvized explosive devices (IEDs). First, CAR field investigators, working primarily in Africa and the Middle East, physically document weapons used by illicit actors in enough detail both to trace the weapons through formal channels, and to compare them with other weapons documented around the world. An independent organization established in 2011, CAR began two years ago to document and track weapons from source to use – a project set up and financed by a European Union (EU) Council Decision in 2013, with funding also from the German, Swiss and United Kingdom (UK) governments.ĬAR uses two basic tools. It is precisely this problem of weapons’ hidden histories that Conflict Armament Research (CAR) has set out to tackle. Officials will be equally familiar, though, with how difficult it is to establish risk factors based on past weapons seizures, and to identify those responsible for trafficking seized weapons, when the history of those weapons has been effectively ‘laundered’ by age and geographical movement, just as surely as the proceeds of crime are laundered by passing through multiple entities and bank accounts. Given the impossibility of physically interdicting every potentially illicit item, Customs officers and investigators have long recognized the need for intelligence-led and risk-led approaches to tackling the illicit weapons trade. Recent atrocities in Paris, France – perpetrated with military firearms originating partly in Eastern European state stocks – highlight the huge challenges of preventing illicit weapons from crossing borders even within Europe, let alone in regions with far more limited enforcement resources, and with much vaster and more remote territories. Such a scenario will be familiar to Customs and enforcement officials all over the world. It is passed on to a foreign insurgent group, discovered at a Customs post while being smuggled across another border, and is finally seized and placed in a Customs storeroom for investigation or disposal. Forty years later, with the original records of its sale long since disposed of or lost, it is stolen from a poorly guarded stockpile, and driven in the back of a truck across a thousand-mile-long border. An assault rifle is shipped to a foreign government in the mid-1970s. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |