A soldier with an elite National Guard unit has been arrested and charged with illegally smuggling sophisticated firearms - including assault rifles and pistols - from New York City to China.
Federal prosecutors say that Joseph Debose, a staff sergeant in a U.S. National Guard Special Forces Unit in North Carolina, was caught packing a loaded .45-caliber pistol and in possession of a dozen guns that he was allegedly planning to ship to China.
"Joseph Debose is a member of the special forces community," Brooklyn Assistant US Attorney Seth DuCharme told a federal judge earlier today.
"We've actually looked at the guns in China that were seized by Chinese customs officials and traced them back to Mr. Debose," DuCharme said, although the serial numbers of some weapons were defaced.
Experts say this international firearms smuggling case is extremely unusual, because it involves rare levels of cooperation between American law enforcement officials and authorities inside mainland China.
Chinese authorities are normally reticent to let information slip about their internal crime problems, but allowed US investigators to travel inside China to aid in the probe - where they worked alongside the anti-smuggling unit of the Shanghai police service.
DuCharme told the judge that the American special forces soldier teamed up with a Chinese national living illegally in the US, Zhifu Lin, who was arrested recently in Morgantown, West Virginia.
Lin was arraigned today in Brooklyn federal court before Magistrate Judge Robert Levy, who ordered him held on both weapons smuggling and immigration charges.
Lin was wanted already by Chinese law enforcement officials for smuggling high tech weapons into China, and an Interpol "Red Notice" had been issued for Lin some time ago, prosecutors said.
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents joined forces with Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms investigators in New York City and learned that some of the weapons were shipped through intermediaries in Queens, New York, and hidden in cargo destined for China.
"The defendants in North Carolina and New York allegedly ran a pipeline of illegal firearms from the United States to China," said Loretta Lynch, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York.
Customs officers in Shanghai, China, discovered a large cache of guns hidden in stereo speakers that had been shipped as freight from the US, officials said.
The gun smuggling operation utilized a number of other American seaports to send other secret shipments of guns overseas, DuCharme told the judge ....
