9th March 2021
Many of you may have seen and read of the attack on an ambulance and the brutal treatment of the medical staff recently, if not on The BFD then the MSM did carry a report.
The window was shot out by a shotgun. Where did the cartridges come from?
An alert citizen journalist found the spent shotgun shell ejected from the police rifle after the event and held it up to a camera.
The shotgun shells were made by the Italian firm Cheddite Italy S.r.l. Cheddite provided a very swift response from a query sent the next day to the company, along with photographs of their product at the attack site. Their reply stated that while they do ship their shotgun shells to many places in the world, they have never exported to Myanmar. They added that their exports are governed by EU regulations. The EU has had an embargo on arms, munitions and military equipment in some form since the 1990s. In 2000, this was expanded to include any equipment that might be used for internal repression or terrorism.
However, major weapons are not being used against popular protests; it is small arms and riot control munitions. So how then did Italian shotgun shells end up in the hands of the police used only a few days ago in an attack on a civilian ambulance? The difficulty answering this question reveals one of the great problems in controlling the sales of arms in today’s world. Tracing military and police weapons and ammunition involves penetrating the private contracts of commercial companies or the sometimes-opaque state to state transfers by which arms are purchased, sold, gifted, brokered and bartered around the world. Once the item is out of the hands of the manufacturer, it can, and with some frequently does, end up anywhere.
In tracking this further through United Nations International Trade Statistics Database (UN Comtrade) it can be discovered that in 2019 a transfer to Myanmar, of items with the commodity identifier for shotgun shells, was sent from Thailand. However, Comtrade displays no record of Thailand importing shotgun shells from Italy in the past 10 years. It does show that Thailand imported shotgun shells from other places, and it is possible that the ammunition passed through more than one country on the way to Myanmar. Comtrade does record a transfer from Italy to Singapore and between Singapore and Thailand with the same identifier code. However, it is impossible from available information in Comtrade to definitively state if these transfers enabled the attack on the ambulance and to terrorize its crew on March 3.
Source The Irrawaddy 9th March 2021.
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