The Calgary Herald (Alberta)
July 21, 2012 Saturday
Final Edition

U.K. dealer jailed for plan to sell missiles

Reuters
LONDON

A British arms dealer was jailed on Friday for trying to buy
surface-toair missiles from North Korea to sell them to the former
Soviet republic of Azerbaijan.

British prosecutors described Michael Ranger as an established
international arms dealer who used a company registered in Hong Kong
under the name of his girlfriend to organize illegal arms deals
between the two countries.

E-mail correspondence read out in court showed that Ranger had boasted
to his arms supplier in North Korea that he had been a guest of the
Azeri government and was chauffeured in a luxury limousine during a
visit to the country to discuss arms sales.

Azerbaijan, an oilproducing Caspian Sea nation bordering Iran, is
under an international arms embargo following a 1990s ethnic conflict
in the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service said Ranger intended to evade the
embargo by promoting the supply of hand-held surface-to-air missiles
from North Korea to Azerbaijan, as well as Beretta pistols from the
United States.

He was jailed for three and a half years.

“Ranger’s dealings with Azerbaijan were not only illegal, but
potentially very dangerous,” the state prosecuting service said in a
statement.

“Arms embargoes are in place for a reason and those who seek to ignore
them in the hope of lining their own pocket should understand that
they are liable to prosecution in the criminal courts.”

Armenian-backed forces wrested Nagorno-Karabakh, a mainly
Armenianpopulated enclave inside Azerbaijan, from Azeri control after
the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

A ceasefire was reached in 1994 after an estimated 30,000 people had
been killed and another one million had been driven from their homes.