BANGKOK — A Thai court on Friday ordered the crew of an Il-76 cargo plane carrying weapons from North Korea to remain in prison for 12 more days, while the pilot refuted reports that the arms were bound for Iran.
Two weeks after the plane was seized, the key questions of who organized the shipment and where it was headed remain unanswered.
In an interview with Itar-Tass and RIA-Novosti published Friday, the plane’s chief pilot, Ilyas Isakov of Kazakhstan, insisted that the final destination was Kiev, but arms trafficking experts published a report a week earlier saying it was headed to Iran.
“We were to fly to Ukraine,” Isakov said. “I don’t know what the cargo owners intended to do next, but we were hired to fly it to Kiev’s Boryspil Airport.”
He said the crew was hired by a Ukrainian air freighter called Aviatek to pick up 35.8 tons of cargo in Pyongyang, North Korea — which included 25 tons of oil-drilling equipment and other cargo in sealed wooden boxes.
A spokesman for the Ukrainian Transportation Ministry contacted Friday would not say if a company called Aviatek is in the ministry’s registry. The search engine of the global aviation registry — www.aerotransport.org — had no listing for a company by that name.
Ukraine’s Council on National Security and Defense said in a statement Friday that no Ukrainian nationals or companies were involved in smuggling the North Korean arms.
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