hoisted from comments

November 14, 2010 in Viktor

From comments on this post, Against Viktorfeed:

*sigh* When is it going to get recognised that you can’t spot an arms flight just by who used to own the aircraft. Jubba Airways isn’t some unknown cargo entity – it’s one of the main commercial passenger carriers into Mogadishu and other parts of Somalia. Are they a bit dodgy? Probably. Do they have dodgy planes? Yes. Does the fact that their dodgy planes may have been formerly owned by arms traffickers mean they’re arms traffickers themselves? No.

To illustrate this whole *you can’t spot an arms flight through the ownership of the plane* thing: Amnesty recently reported that arms were being flown from Bulgaria into Kigali in late 2008, just as Kigali was ramping up support for the CNDP in eastern DRC, on a *standard Air France passenger flight*. Which I’m pretty sure wouldn’t have shown up on the ‘Viktorfeed’.

www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/ACT30/015/2010/en

The key question is always who owns the cargo, and (for charter flight), who is *chartering* the plane. Not who owns or even operates the plane.

I’ve never been entirely confident on this point. Thoughts?

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