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Shymkent, Kazakhstan - The trail of the plane busted in Thailand last month for allegedly smuggling North Korean weapons to Iran leads back to a small air freight company housed near an old Soviet airfield on the edge of the Kazakh steppe.
The aging Russian plane's odyssey took it through a web of companies, financiers and air cargo carriers with addresses stretching from New York through the Persian Gulf to New Zealand, an Associated Press investigation has found.
The persistence of carriers willing to ship anything anywhere for a price - even to countries under international sanctions like Iran and North Korea - has frustrated global efforts to stem the flow of illegal arms.
Alexander Zykov, whose crew was flying the plane grounded in Bangkok, denies he had anything to do with the seized shipment of 35 tons of explosives, rocket-propelled grenades, surface-to-air missiles and other weaponry.
But family members say the plane's pilot and crew were working for Zykov's East Wing air freight company when they were taken into custody. And crewmen who have worked for Zykov told The Associated Press that they have flown cargo on rattletrap Russian planes into conflict zones such as Sudan and Somalia.
They often did not know what their cargo really was, four of these crewmen said. Two of them spoke of an industry that sometimes uses falsified flight documents and skirts customs rules.
The Soviet collapse left an infrastructure of idled aircraft and pilots desperate for work, and the families of the arrested crew portrayed them as pawns in this arms trade.
Speaking from the Kazakh city of Almaty, Zykov insisted his crew wasn't working for him at the time of the Dec. 12 weapons seizure, saying all five took an unpaid leave about two weeks before the flight. He and his wife, Svetlana Zykova, who is listed as the plane's owner, denied any knowledge that arms were involved.
"Go find the people who ordered this flight," Zykov told an AP reporter and hung up the phone.
The AP spent three weeks trying to do that, studying documents and talking to pilots, shippers, government officials and experts on arms trafficking. No one would take responsibility for the arms aboard the flight, which, had it not been seized, would have followed a circuitous route spanning more than 15 000 miles.
The case came to light when Bangkok police, acting on a tip, said they seized the Russian-made Ilyushin-76 cargo plane and its five-member crew - four Kazakhs and a Belarusian - after finding weapons on board.
All five have been charged with possessing arms and are in a Thai jail pending investigation.
Korea/Ukraine connection
The Russian-language flight plan names Mehrabad Airport in Tehran as the cargo's destination. The cargo manifest lists "oil industry spare parts" of various types but no weapons.
Aerotrack of Ukraine and the Korean General Trading Corporation of Pyongyang, North Korea, are identified as the companies responsible for the cargo.
Shymkent, the town where the four Kazakh crew members come from, is a dismal ex-Soviet outpost full of ramshackle houses and kebab shops. Zykov, a local cargo magnate, is something of a legend here, and the airmen who work for him are known around town as "Zykovtsy" - Zykov's guys.
According to the arrested crew's families, Zykov has employed them for about a decade and hired them for the Bangkok flight.
Zykov houses his pilots in a compound at the edge of town.
Pavel Mogilevsky, who manages the compound, confirmed to the AP that the crew members arrested in Thailand were East Wing employees.
"Yes, those are our guys. They worked for us," he said, after opening a heavy metal door in the outer wall for a brief chat. But on this particular flight, he said, they were moonlighting for another employer whom he didn't identify, and he denied East Wing was involved.
This is not the first time Zykov's name has come up in connection with sanctions-busting flights, said Brian Johnson-Thomas, an arms trafficking expert who works closely with the International Peace Information Service, a Belgium-based independent research institute that focuses on Sub-Saharan Africa.
According to a UN Security Council report from November 2006, a firm owned by Zykov's wife provided the plane that carried Somali volunteers to fight alongside the Hezbollah militia against Israel during the 2006 Lebanon War.
"It also flew (Somali) volunteers for training to both Libya and Syria," Johnson-Thomas said.
He added that in both cases - the Somalia flights and last month's Thai seizure - the Zykovs may have been unaware of what their planes were being used for.
In Shymkent, an engineer who has worked on Zykov's planes for years said the men jailed in Thailand were part of Zykov's regular crew. But the engineer said crew members would have been free to take work from another employer between East Wing flights.
"You get paid to do the flight, and you don't ask any questions about what's inside the boxes," said the engineer, who also asked not to be identified, fearing for his job.
- AP
