US intercepts Egypt-North Korea arms shipment

US authorities spotted a freight ship named Jie Shun flying a Cambodian flag which was carrying a huge arms cache was secretly heading from North Korea to Egypt forcing Cairo to sieze it, the Washington Post reported on Sunday.

At first, the US intelligence warned Egyptians that a North Korean crew and unknown cargo shrouded by heavy tarp was heading to an unknown destination.

Egyptian customs agents seized the ship at the Suez Canal, a UN report said, and they discovered a cache of more than 30,000 rocket-propelled grenades concealed under bins of iron ore.

The Washington Post said that the UN report later concluded that this was the “largest seizure of ammunition in the history of sanctions against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”

According to the UN report, the weapons were paid for by Egyptian businessmen and it was heading to the North African country.

US officials and Western diplomat said that the Egyptian businessmen kept the transactions in the deal secret, noting that this incident prompted the latest in a series of intense US complaints over Egyptian efforts to obtain banned military hardware from Pyongyang.

Read: Egypt cuts military ties with North Korea

“Egypt will continue to abide by all Security Council resolutions and will always be in conformity with these resolutions as they restrain military purchases from North Korea,” a statement by the Egyptian Embassy in the US said.

However, the US officials said that Egypt foiled this deal after the US spotted it and alerted Cairo, forcing it to take action. The officials stated that Jie Shun is an episode in a series of such secret deals that pushed the Trump administration to freeze or delay nearly $300 million in military aid to Egypt over the summer.

The report said that it was not clear whether North Korea was paid for the estimated $23 million rocket shipment or not, but said this illustrates one of the key challenges faced by world leaders in seeking to change North Korea’s behaviour through economic pressure.