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Text of report by Italian privately-owned centrist newspaper La Stampa website, on 21 December
[Report by Maurizio Molinari: "Pact Between Caracas and Tehran: Airplanes in Return for Weapons"]
New York - Tehran is using airplanes belonging to the Venezuelan flagship airline to dodge UN sanctions, thanks to an agreement between Mahmud Ahmadinezhad and Hugo Chavez designed to boost Iranian penetration in Latin America. This story is contained in a number of Western intelligence memoranda on the impact of Ahmadinezhad's accords with a number of Latin American countries.
According to the memoranda that La Stampa has been able to consult, the pact between Tehran and Caracas revolves around a trade-off: Chavez allows Ahmadinezhaed to freely use his airplanes, and he gets military aid in return. Iran is using the Conviasa company's aircraft on the Tehran -Damascus -Caracas trade route for a variety of purposes, first and foremost to transfer scientific material towards the Syrian Research and Study Centre's laboratories in Damascus. We are apparently talking, in particular, about shipments of CNC [computer numerical control] machines, computers for controlling missiles, and materiel for the development of carriers, with the production of engines heading the list.
The shipments are made by an industrial group called Shahid...