It was the seventh case in recent months in which governments have announced seizing cargoes headed from or to Iran that violate UN sanctions.
The Turkish announcement did not describe the contents of the cargo. But UN sanctions bar the Islamic Republic from exporting arms, so the cargo most likely involved military equipment.
Sanctions also bar Iran from importing most weapons or equipment for its nuclear enrichment and missile programs.
The plane was headed for Syria. Iran is widely believed to send arms to Syria for distribution to the Lebanese Hezbollah. But this particular flight took place as Syria was engaged in putting down widespread anti-regime protests. So it is possible the cargo was gear needed by the Syria military to suppress the uprisings.
Some Iranian dissident websites have been claiming that Iran has sent Pasdar troops to Syria to shoot protesters there. However, there is no evidence for that at all. Syria has a very large army, far in excess of what is needed to confront protesters.
The Turkish government statement said it confiscated the cargo from the Iranian plane, but Turkey also said there were seven crewmen on board and denied reports they had been arrested. The plane and crew flew back to Iran last Tuesday, four days after the plane was forced to land at Diyarbakir for inspection.
It was the second plane Turkey had ordered to land for inspection during March. That suggests very serious suspicions of what Iran is up to. The first plane was found to be carrying nothing but food and was allowed to continue on its way to Syria.
Initial Turkish news reports said the planes were believed to be carrying nuclear materials for Syria. But later reports said the cargo that was seized involved light weapons such as rifles, rocket launchers and mortars. Rocket launchers and mortars would not be of much use in suppressing street protests, but they are major weapons in the Hezbollah inventory for use in any conflict with Israel.
The Turkish government is known to have ordered Iranian planes to land for inspections periodically over the years. So far as is known, this is the first time the cargo has been found to be illegal.
The total number of aircraft ordered to land over the years is unknown. China’s Xinhua News Service reported last week that in 2006 Turkey ordered the landing of five cargo planes and one passenger plane all bound from Iran to Syria. It said no illegal cargoes were found in any of those inspections.
Iran has acknowledged that its planes were searched. It has not reported that the cargo on the second plane was seized. The Islamic Republic has played down the role of Turkey in searching the planes, apparently trying to avoid any upsurge of nationalist anger against Turkey. Iranian officials have said Iran’s planes were not forced to land in Turkey but came down under “previous coordination” between the two countries. But if Iran sent an aircraft with a shipment that violated UN sanctions into Turkey knowing it would be inspected on the ground, that would suggest such an extreme level of ineptitude as not to be believable.
The Turkish seizures are just the latest in a series of seizures of arms from Iran or illegal shipments into Iran over the last six months. The other known cases involve:
• Thirteen containers of Iranian arms seized last October in Nigeria and bound for Gambia;
• A truckload of Iranian arms seized in Afghanistan in February and believed bound for the Taliban;
• A shipload of Iranian arms believed bound for Gaza that was seized by Israel in the Mediterranean last month;
• Malaysia said last week it was inspecting two containers seized from a Malaysian-registered hip headed for Iran. It did not say what the cargo involved;
• Singapore notified the UN sanctions committee it seized a shipment of aluminum powder that can be used in rockets from a ship bound for Iran that had stopped in Singapore last September;
• South Korea told the UN sanctions committee that it seized 400 tubes believed of a nuclear design from a cargo aircraft in December. It didn’t say if the plane was headed to or from Iran.
A Kuwaiti news report last week said Qatar had seized two Iranian boats in the Persian Gulf carrying arms, but Qatar denied that story.
