smuggling

One thing that is perhaps being overlooked by people discussing whether or not it would be wise to impose a no-fly zone over Libya is exactly what such a zone would set out to prevent. When it was first suggested, it was inspired by the general horror that the Libyan government was having crowds of…

Read More And it’s one jet airliner, for ten prisoners…

Something interesting on the Air Cocaine story. A lurker dropped off this: El avión, Boeing 727, siglas J5-GCU de Guinea Bissau, aterrizó en el aeropuerto internacional La Chinita de Maracaibo a las 11:00 pm del 16 de octubre, procedente de Panamá. Allí permaneció poco más de una hora, mientras llenaba los tanques de combustible. Antes…

Read More a technical stop

There’s quite a lot of buzz about this story, in which a DHS report into criminal use of aircraft over the South Atlantic gets rehashed. The “Air Cocaine” case in Mali has given the whole thing another layer of sexy, of course, and it’s good to know that the problem is recognised – even better…

Read More the all purpose al-Qa’ida argument applied to aviation

OK, so there’s a recently wrecked aircraft on an airstrip in northeastern Mali and the UN reckons it brought over 10 tons of cocaine into the new West Africa-Southern Europe smuggling route. However, no-one seems to know what type of aircraft it is or what the registration was. All sources I can find – which…

Read More I should really think of an Ali Farka Toure lyric title for this post

Remember those Tuareg uranium guerrillas? Back in the summer of 2007, just before the crash, they were busy raiding Chinese prospectors and intriguing with both the French and the Nigerien government. And blogging, ISTR, on their Thuraya satphones. Now look what’s happened: they’ve been recruited by the Algerians to fight Al-Qa’ida, or more specificially the…

Read More making an arrest

We keep hearing that the Iranian government, or at least one of the competing centres of power within it, is trying to jam satellite TV downlinks and harassing the owners of satellite dishes. The BBC World Service and Al-Jazeera have reportedly both been targeted, specifically as they both use one of the HotBird satellites over…

Read More satellite’s gone, way up to Mars…