An investigative reporter who claimed to have discovered a covert scheme “masterminded” by the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia and UAE to supply weapons to Daesh and Al-Qaeda terrorist groups under the watch of the CIA and NATO, has been sacked by her employers for what she describes as “telling the truth about weapons supplies to terrorists”.
Bulgarian journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhiev claims she was dismissed after being interrogated by security forces following her report that “at least 350 diplomatic …flights transported weapons for war conflicts across the world over the last three years”. Her bombshell report in July for the Trud newspaper alleged that “the state aircraft of Azerbaijan carried on board tens of tonnes of heavy weapons and ammunition headed to terrorists under the cover of diplomatic flights”.
Gaytandzhiev told MEMO that an anonymous Twitter account had given her access to sensitive official documents showing that Silk Way Airlines was offered diplomatic flights for US and Israeli arms manufactures as well as to officials from Saudi Arabia and the UAE for the transportation of weapons from her country. These trips were used to ship weapons to terrorist groups under the cover of diplomatic flight which are exempt from normal checks and taxes.
Speaking to MEMO today Gaytandzhiev said that she had been covering the Arab Spring, Gaza War of 2014 and Syria conflict since 2011. Having visited Syria on a number of occasions, she said that her suspicions were raised in 2014 when she found Bulgarian-made weapons in the hands of “terrorists” in Aleppo. She said that she then traced those weapons to its Bulgarian manufacturer only to find that they were legally exported to Saudi Arabia, which in turn supplied them to “terrorists” in Syria.
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Gaytandzhiev explained that Saudi Arabia does not use Eastern European standard weapons; it uses US grade weapons. Naturally, she continued, this revelation increased her curiosity over the final destination of the arms being purchased by Riyadh. The troll of documents obtained from an anonymous source, she explained, revealed that there was an international “scheme” “masterminded” by the US, Israel, Saudi and the UAE to deliver weapons from Bulgaria using private military contractors.
She had then planned to visit Syria next week, she explained, as her editor agreed that she needed to obtain more details about the weapons supply as well as the groups using them.
However, on Thursday Gaytandzhiev tweeted that she had been fired from her job at Trud after being interrogated by the Bulgarian national security. She complained that the Bulgarian security officials were more interested in knowing the source of the documents instead of investigating the truth about the allegations made in her report.
I've just got fired for telling the truth about weapons supplies for #terrorists in #Syria on diplomatic flights https://t.co/wSJTRIzKnr
— Dilyana Gaytandzhieva (@dgaytandzhieva) August 24, 2017
A visibly distressed Gaytandzhiev protested that she had been “horrified” by the revelation that her country was embroiled in a covert operation overseen by the US, Israel and allies in the Gulf to arm “terrorist” groups in Syria and hopes she never again has to explain to Syrians why Bulgarian weapons were ending up in the hands of militants in their country.