The Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT) is conducting checks after the Sky News feature on two traffickers willing to sell weapons in Romania.
The DIICOT chief prosecutor Daniel Horodniceanu told Agerpres that the Directorate is checking the information in the mass media on the gun dealers in Romania, arguing that ‘there are a lot of unknown facts and contradictions” in this case.
“We are probing into the credibility of the information published in the media today. There are a lot of unknowns, many contradictions. It’s seems a little bit odd that the gunrunners let themselves being shot by the British journalists, particularly that they hint the traffickers know they are journalists,” Horodniceanu said on Sunday.
Later on Sunday morning, Horodniceanu said that he doesn’t rule out a blot attempt, as the weapons presented in the footage seem to be hunting arms, also commenting that it’s enviable “the luck of some journalists’ who are shooting masked traffickers.
“I saw the arms presented by the British journalists and at first sight, yet judging with a non-expert eye, they don’t seem war weapons, but rather hunting arms. Secondly, it’s enviable the luck of some journalists who are effectively shooting three masked dealers, about whom they basically say that took their phones and locked them in the car, although they initially reported the lack of signal. We don’t rule out any options. We got in contact with our foreign partners, both with the intelligence services and with the police. We are going to do our job, but we don’t rule out a discredit attempt either. No one has proven in western Europe where terror attacks occured, unlike Romania, that the arms would have ever originated from Eastern Europe,” the DIICOT head told jourrnalists, as quoted by Agerpres.
A stance has been asked from the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI), but the service refused to confirm or deny the existence of such report to other state institutions related to this case, according to Mediafax.
According to the Sky News feature, their investigators traveled ‘deep into Romania to meet gun dealers willing to sell military-grade weapons to terrorists (…) After months of negotiation with a Romanian gang Sky News was directed to a remote part of the country for a meeting with gang members prepared to show us what they could supply.’
“There is no subterfuge here. They knew we were a news organisation wanting to illustrate how getting a weapon is relatively easy and they believed we were going to buy them.
We did not, which made matters a little tricky.
The point is they didn’t care who we were if we were prepared to pay. Throughout our meeting they made it clear they would sell to absolutely anyone; bank robber, mass murderer or terrorist, they made no distinction,” the reporters recount.
The Romanian gunrunners told Sky News team that their weapons are smuggled from Ukraine into Romania before being shipped by another gang to Western Europe and the middle east.
“We bring them from Ukraine with the ammunition, as much as you want,” one of two alleged smugglers said.
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