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Kidnap Deaths Spotlight Serbia-Libya Arms Deals Ivan Angelovski Links between arms deals and the kidnapping of two Serbian embassy employees killed in a US air strike on an ISIS camp are bringing fresh scrutiny to the controversial trade between Belgrade and Tripoli. A leading military expert has called for a Serbian parliamentary committee to investigate the kidnap by ISIS of two employees of Belgrade's embassy in Tripoli, after Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic at the weekend revealed a new link between the incident and the arms trade. Military expert Aleksandar Radic told BIRN that an inquiry was needed to establish the facts surrounding the abduction of Sladjana Stankovic and Jovica Stepic, who died in a US airstrike on an ISIS camp where the two were being held. The embassy employees were seized in November by gunmen close to ISIS who crashed into a convoy of vehicles taking Serbia's ambassador Oliver Potezica to neighbouring Tunisia. The ambassador escaped unharmed. Vucic told a press conference on Saturday that securing a ransom from Serbia was not the kidnappers' primary motive and connected the case to "certain arms deals". "There are some other motives [for the kidnapping] which I would rather not talk about today, and which are related to certain weapons deals," Vucic said. Sanctions on Libya The UN imposed an arms embargo on Libya in February 2011 to prevent further human rights abuses. This was lifted in September 2011 after Libyan opposition forces took control of Tripoli from Colonel Gaddafi, although the government was required to notify the UN sanctions committee in advance of weapons imports. In August 2014, following the start of the civil war, this process was tightened, requiring the internationally recognised government in Tobruk to apply for approval in advance of arms imports. The authorities in Tripoli are barred from buying weapons. While Belgrade appears to have halted official exports to Libya in August 2014, when the country descended into civil war, BIRN has collected evidence showing that the Islamist-led authorities in Tripoli and the internationally recognised government in Tobruk have continued to look to Serbia as a source of weapons and ammunition. Rumours linking the kidnapping to arms deals have been circulating in political and intelligence circles for months. Diplomatic sources who spoke to BIRN have however given very different and often contradictory accounts, suggesting the involvement of different Libyan factions and various arms dealers. Serbia's foreign ministry is expected to carry out an internal investigation into the events, but Radic believes that a parliamentary committee, formed of MPs and held in public, was the best way to establish the truth. He also queried why Serbia had chosen to maintain an embassy in Tripoli, which is controlled by an unrecognised Islamist administration, while most countries had closed theirs or moved them to the seat of the internationally backed government in Tobruk. "This is a textbook example of the need to establish a parliamentary commission which will answer all the open questions - foreign policy, arms deals and in whose interest we maintained our embassy with a government that was not recognized by us or by the international community," he said. A long history of arms deals Serbia has a long and controversial history of supplying weapons to Libya - a relationship which has come under increased scrutiny over the past year as United Nations investigators have attempted to stem the flow of arms to the war-torn country. BIRN has previously documented these links, which involve two of Serbia's most high-profile weapons dealers - Slobodan Tesic and Petar Crnogorac - although there is no evidence linking either of them to the kidnapping. In February last year, the UN's panel of experts on Libya revealed a large deal between Tripoli and Tesic, Serbia's most notorious arms merchant, who was placed on a UN black list for more than a decade because of sanctions-busting in Liberia. He supplied 3,000 tonnes of Belarussian ammunition as well as Serbian small arms, light weapons and machine guns to Libya from 2013 to the summer of 2014. The contract was inked after an official visit to Belgrade in 2013 by Khaled Al Sharif, a former member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group who was then the official deputy defence minister. The UN revealed that prior to April 2014, some of these weapons appear to have been delivered to "autonomous armed group" connected to Sharif, and not the Libyan army. Later, as Libya fractured, the deliveries were made solely to areas under the control of groups linked to the official Libyan army. Exports from Serbia were halted in the summer of 2014 when Libya descended into civil war between the Islamist regime in control of Tripoli, including Sharif, and the internationally recognised government in Tobruk. In a bid to quell the unrest, the government in Tobruk attempted to secure a major haul of weapons in February 2015, including ammunition from Serbia, but was blocked by the UN Security Council members over fears the equipment could end up in the wrong hands, according to a Reuters news agency report. General Khalifa Haftar, the head of Libya's official army, also quietly visited Serbia in June 2015, although no arms deals are believed to have stemmed from his meetings there. It also appears that Sharif, as defence minister of the Tripoli government, attempted to reopen supply lines from the Tripoli government with Serbia in December 2014 through Tehnoremont, a subsidiary of the Serbian arms exporter CPR Impex, owned by Petar Crnogorac. Documents obtained by BIRN show that UN panel obtained a suspicious "end user certificate", one of the key documents required to receive to export weapons. The documents detail ammunition, rocket launchers and mortar shells to be exported from Serbia and Montenegro. Crnogorac has previously told BIRN that while discussions had been held on exports to Libya, no deal was signed and that proper procedures would have been followed if it had gone ahead. The UN panel is expected to produce its latest report, which will likely reveal its finding on the Tehnoremont case, in the coming months.
