PANAMA CITY, (Reuters) – Panama seized a North Korean cargo ship it suspects was hiding missile equipment in a shipment of brown sugar from Cuba, after a standoff in which the ship’s captain tried to slit his own throat.
The ship was stopped last week as it headed into the Panama Canal and authorities arrested the crew yesterday after finding undeclared missile-shaped objects – a potential violation of U.N. sanctions linked to North Korea’s nuclear program.
“We found containers which presumably contain sophisticated missile equipment. That is not allowed. The Panama canal is a canal of peace, not war,” Panama’s President Ricardo Martinelli told local radio on Tuesday.
A photo posted on Martinelli’s official Twitter page showed a long, green missile-shaped object with a tapering, conical end inside the ship. A security expert said pictures showed radar systems for Vietnam-era, Soviet-made surface-to-air missiles.
The U.S. State Department praised Panama’s decision to raid the ship, which it said had a history of involvement in drug smuggling, and warned the vessel would be violating United Nations Security Council resolutions by shipping arms.
The United Nations has imposed a raft of sanctions on North Korea, including strict regulations on arms shipments, for flouting measures aimed at curbing its nuclear weapons program.
Panama’s security minister, Jose Raul Mulino, said his government had stopped the ship last Wednesday and had so far found two containers of military equipment.
He did not specify whether the cargo contained actual missiles but said the search could last up to week.
When Panamanian officials began looking inside containers stuffed with over 250,000 100-kilogram (220-pound) bags of brown sugar, the captain became violent, Mulino said.
The captain, a North Korean citizen like the crew, tried to slit his throat with a knife, a police official said. The man was in hospital in stable condition, the official added, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Ben Rhode, a North Korea security expert at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, suggested the captain’s suicide attempt might have been an effort to escape severe punishment by officials in North Korea for failing to carry out his mission.
All 35 members of the crew of the ship, which is called Chong Chon Gang, were arrested after resisting Panamanian orders and are now being questioned at Fort Sherman, a former U.S. Army Base on the Atlantic, the official added.
Javier Caraballo, Panama’s top anti-drugs prosecutor, told local television the ship was headed to North Korea.
ILLICIT CARGO
IHS Jane, a global analytics firm, said it had identified the equipment shown in the images as an SNR-75 ‘Fan Song’ fire control radar for the SA-2 family of surface-to-air missiles.
The radar, built by Russian weapons manufacturer Almaz-Antey and first used during the Vietnam war, has been credited with destroying many Western aircraft, according to Air Power Australia, a defense think tank.
More recently, the relatively cheap and simple system has been put to use in the Middle East and Africa.
Carlo Kopp of Air Power Australia said as China was manufacturing the SNR-75 up until the end of the 1980s, North Korea likely already had the radars in its stockpile.
Cuban government officials declined comment on the incident, which drew a stinging response from some U.S. critics of the island’s Communist leadership.
U.S. Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Florida Republican who heads the House subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa, called on President Barack Obama’s administration to cancel migration talks with Cuba this week.
North Korea is under wide-ranging sanctions enacted by the United Nations, the United States and the European Union, including a U.N. ban on all arms exports, due to its nuclear program.
“Shipments of arms or related materiel to and from (North) Korea would violate Security Council resolutions, three of them as a matter of fact,” said U.S. Ambassador Rosemary DiCarlo, president of the U.N. Security Council this month.
“Obviously this shipment, if it’s confirmed to have what we suspect, would be of interest to the (U.N. North Korea) sanctions committee,” she told reporters in New York.
Previous violations of sanctions included North Korean shipments of arms-related material to Syria in November 2010 and rocket fuses for Iran in 2008.
SHIP
The ship, built in 1977, was tracked leaving Port Vostochny, in Russia’s far east, on April 12, according to Lloyd’s List Intelligence, a maritime intelligence company. It was next registered arriving in Balboa, on the Panama Canal’s Pacific side, on May 31, and crossed the waterway the next day heading for Havana.
It then disappeared from the tracking system and reappeared in Manzanillo, Panama, on July 11, according to shipping data obtained by research group IHS Maritime. IHS said there were indications it had changed cargo in the interim.
In 2010, the Chong Chon Gang was stopped by Ukrainian authorities who found small-arms ammunition and narcotics aboard the vessel, according to Hugh Griffiths, an arms trafficking expert at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
A year earlier, the ship had stopped in Tartus, Syria, home to a Russian naval base, Griffiths added.
