Our friend Fausta Wertz always picks up some of the most fascinating stories and today she’s got a good one. The Greeks have intercepted a rust bucket ship with some very interesting cargo that was heading for an Islamist controlled area of Libya. The boxes seem to be labeled as some rather generic looking office equipment, but the contents were… rather different.

Greek authorities have discovered a gargantuan cache of weapons aboard a cargo ship headed to an Islamist controlled area of Libya.The coastguard said a search of only the first two of the 14 containers carried by the Bolivian vessel Haddad 1 had revealed almost 500,000 rounds of ammunition and 5,000 shotguns, of a type similar to that used by police, with no accompanying documentation.

Fausta picked up one thing from the article which I would never have noticed, but being one of our authorities on Central and South American activities she nailed it right away. The ship was listed as being Bolivian and registered out of the “port of La Paz.” Why is that unusual? Let’s allow her to explain.

Excuse me! “Registered in the port of La Paz”? What the hell?? La Paz is 12,000 feet above sea level (3,650 meters to be accurate), and is the de facto capital of a friggin’ landlocked country

The contents of the ships, which Fausta details in the linked article, were hardly what was portrayed in the packaging or the shipping documents. Rather than a bunch of filing cabinets there were a half million shells and 5,000 of these:

It’s not the best quality picture in the world but I recognized the brand logo. Those are from Torun Arms, based in Turkey. (I should clarify at this point that when I say “Turkish arms” I don’t mean they were supplied by the government of Turkey… just that they were manufactured there as near as I can tell.) The model is hard to determine, but it clearly seems to be similar to their vertical magazine M-12. These aren’t duck hunting shotguns. I’ve run across Torun a few times in other stories over the years and as I recall they have some military contracts, so this may be a version they don’t offer for public consumption. They’re not cheap, either, so whoever financed this little party had plenty of cash on hand.

So who was shipping this much firepower to Libya, presumably to the Islamic forces controlling the area? And who paid for it? So many questions and so few details. Check out Fausta’s full article for the details, but there’s clearly plenty of maneuvering going on over there and I doubt this signals good news for anyone opposed to the terrorists.