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18 07 2007 Skopje_ A Macedonian court jailed four men for arms smuggling on Tuesday. Three were senior officials at the defence ministry charged with abusing their positions to sell old army weapons.
Nelko Menkinovski, head of the defence ministry’s logistics sector, and Viktor Raicki, advisor in the same sector, received sentences of four years in jail.
The commander of the Army general staff, Ilija Skodrovski, was sentenced to three years and the manager of the company MZT servis, Gligor Stojanov, to two years.
The men sold obsolete army machineguns at discount prices to a Bulgarian company named Emko, defrauding the state to the tune of 690,000 US dollars.
The scandal became public in December 2006 after the police seized army weapons shipments loaded on unescorted trucks leaving an army base.
Former prime minister Vlado Buckovski and former defence minister Lazar Elenovski testified at an earlier court hearing that they knew of the army’s intent to dispose of the obsolete weapons, and claimed the price of 300 US Dollars per machinegun was realistic.
At the beginning of 2010 BIRN network published Digging Deeper - A Guide for Investigative Journalists in the Balkans, written in cooperation with Sheila Coronel, Director of the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism and professor of professional practice at Columbia University, New York.
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