Barry Stoller
Sun, 27 Jan 2002 14:40:11 -0800
Reuters. 27 January 2002. IRA Suspects Sold Colombian Rebels Rockets - Report. BOGOTA -- Three suspected members of the Irish Republican Army under arrest in Bogota allegedly sold rockets to leftist Colombian rebels and trained them to build bombs over a three-year period, according to testimony by a rebel defector published on Sunday. The testimony of the former guerrilla fighter, named in court documents as Alexander, is being used in state proceedings against the Irishmen -- held in Colombian jail since August on charges of training the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. Alexander, who said he was a driver for FARC commander Fabian Ramirez, said he first saw the Irish trio in 1998 when they were teaching the rebels to build pipe bombs and work with dynamite. The rebel defector said he again saw the Irishmen -- Martin McCauley, James Monaghan, and Niall Connolly, who was the Cuban representative of the IRA's political ally, Sinn Fein -- on July 27, 1999, when they sold the FARC 30 cases of rockets. "It was on this day that they (FARC leaders) gave me the order to pick them up (from the airport). They arrived on a small plane that carried five cases (of rockets). Thirty minutes later another small plane arrived carrying 25 cases of rockets," Alexander said, in selected excerpts from court testimony published by weekly news magazine Cambio. The ex-rebel said he drove the trio to a meeting with Ramirez and chief FARC commander Manuel "Sureshot" Marulanda. A half-hour later, he drove them back to the airport in San Vicente, the largest town in a Switzerland-sized safe haven in southern Colombia ceded to the FARC three years ago to launch peace talks. "They boarded the same plane and left," Alexander said, adding their job was "to sell them (the rockets), nothing else." He added that an unidentified German man arrived in the FARC safe haven 15 days later, and spent two months training the rebels how to fire the rockets. The three men were arrested at the Bogota airport last year as they attempted to leave Colombia, where they had been traveling with false passports. Traces of explosives were found on their clothes and the trio, who British police say are members of the mainstream IRA, could face eight years in jail if convicted of training anti-government guerrillas. The men have denied IRA links and accuse foreign intelligence agencies of inventing the charges to derail peace efforts in Northern Ireland. Alexander said he saw two of the Irishmen return to the guerrilla haven in 2000, when they spent one month training the rebels with Ecuadorean CL-28 anti-tank weapons, which he said the FARC use to take down helicopters. The trio again allegedly arrived in the enclave in December of 2000, to train the guerrillas to lay mines. Summarizing the supposed training, Alexander said the Irishmen also taught the rebel fighters the basics of intelligence gathering. "Intelligence is about how to take over towns o rbattalions. It went so far as how to identify a soldier or a police officer, how to ask questions in a town or city, to get a girlfriend in a town or city -- hopefully sisters of policemen or military troops. This is intelligence," he said. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Barry Stoller http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ProletarianNews