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US troops have found more than a hundred Austrian-made sniper rifles, which were sold to Iran, in a Baghdad raid on insurgents, The Daily Telegraph has reported citing unnamed defence sources.
The .50 calibre weapons, which are capable of penetrating body armour, were part of a shipment of 800 rifles exported by Austrian arms manufacturer Steyr-Mannlicher to Iran last year, the newspaper said.
“Although we did make our worries known the sale unfortunately went ahead, and now the potential that these weapons could fall into the wrong hands appears to have happened,” a spokesman for the British foreign ministry was quoted as saying by the Telegraph.
Britain and the United States had condemned the sale when it originally happened because of their fears that the weapons, which the National Iranian Police Organisation said it was buying to use against drug smugglers, would find their way to insurgents in Iraq.
The report comes days after top US defense officials said that sophisticated Iranian-built bombs smuggled into Iraq have killed at least 170 US and allied soldiers since June 2004 and wounded 620 more.
According to The Daily Telegraph, within 45 days of the HS50 Steyr-Mannlicher rifles arriving in Iran, a US soldier in an armoured vehicle was killed by an Iraqi insurgent using one of the weapons.
US troops had found in the past six months small numbers of the rifles, which each cost 10,000 pounds (15,000 euros, 19,500 dollars), but a raid in Baghdad over the last 24 hours has increased that total to more than a hundred
