Iranian Effort to Send Bosnia Arms Reported

An Iranian air force cargo plane secretly unloaded an estimated 4,000 machine guns and 1 million rounds of ammunition at a Croatian airport last weekend in an apparent attempt by the Islamic state to smuggle weapons to Muslim forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina, according to U.S. officials.

The shipment was one of the most brazen efforts yet to circumvent a year-old U.N. arms embargo in the region. It has intensified concern that Iran and other nations could fuel an already explosive civil war by giving new firepower to the Bosnian Muslims who are battling Serbian forces for control of the former Yugoslav republic.

U.N. officials who learned of the arms transfer have confronted Croatian authorities and persuaded them to impound the shipment, the U.S. sources said. But one source said that Croatian officials, who permitted the fully laden Iranian air force 747 to land at the Zagreb airport, also may have been involved in the scheme.

A senior official said the United States “strongly suspects” that the shipment was dispatched by the Iranian government, which has expressed support for the Muslim-led Bosnian regime. Officials describe the Bush Administration as deeply troubled by the episode, which one source called a “red-handed” case of government violation of the U.N. embargo.

“We don’t need more weapons in Bosnia,” one U.S. official said. “More arms are not going to help reduce the level of tension and violence and bloodshed.”

The United States has not yet issued a formal protest of Iran’s suspected action. But a senior State Department official said that the U.N. Sanctions Committee could take action against Iran after receiving formal notification of the incident.

The episode, which appears to substantiate longtime suspicions that Islamic nations are providing arms to Bosnian Muslims, raises new questions about the ability of the United Nations to maintain the sanctions over the long term in the face of such defiance.

U.S. officials said the crew of the Iranian plane claimed to be carrying humanitarian supplies when the craft landed early one morning last weekend and taxied to the Zagreb airport’s cargo terminal. But even though the plane bore air force markings and carried as many as 40 soldiers, U.N. officials standing by at the airport had no authority to inspect the shipment.

The incident, some of the details of which were said to remain classified, serves as a sign of the increasingly complicated nature of the bloody conflict that has inflamed passions and divided loyalties around the world.

The Bosnian Muslims are badly outnumbered and outgunned by their Serbian rivals, whose arsenals are swollen with machine guns, tanks and artillery from disbanded units of the former Yugoslav army. At a recent conference in Jakarta, Indonesia, Islamic nations complained that the year-old U.N. embargo left Bosnia, whose forces have only small arms, unable to defend itself.

The German government and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher also have called for the lifting of the prohibition of arms sales to Bosnia. But the United States and most of its European allies advocate the continuation of the embargo as a means of limiting further bloodshed in a war that has claimed tens of thousands of lives.

Although recent reports of Serbian atrocities have tilted much American public sentiment in favor of Bosnian forces, the Bush Administration has emphasized that both sides bear responsibility for the bloodshed. A U.S. official who outlined the apparent case of Iranian smuggling and Croatian complicity on behalf of Bosnian Muslims said it shows that “there are no good guys in this thing.”

Accounts of the incident remained somewhat murky, and U.S. officials described the episode only on condition of anonymity. A senior State Department official said the Iranian aircraft arrived at the airport in the Croatian capital on Friday.

In Zagreb, however, a spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees placed the arrival on Sunday. He said a “considerable quantity” of large boxes was unloaded and that the goods were trucked away.

“Yes, an Iranian plane did come,” said the spokesman, Michael Keats. “Yes, it was unloaded. But what was in it we don’t know. It was taken by Croatian authorities.”

Because its boxes were unloaded at the cargo terminal rather than at an adjoining U.N. site for humanitarian deliveries, the U.N. authorities were not authorized to intervene. But U.S. sources said they had determined beyond a doubt that the shipment contained weapons and said that Croatian authorities had agreed to prevent its transfer to combatants.

“They took control of the shipment and did the right thing,” a senior State Department official said. He said the estimated 4,000 machine guns and ammunition were being stored in a Zagreb warehouse. The Iranian aircraft was said to have returned to Iran.

Staff writers Carol J. Williams, in Vienna, and Norman Kempster, in Washington, contributed to this article.