Washington asks Peru about Jordanian guns in Colombia

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- The United States asked Peru for information about Soviet-era guns sold by Jordan that ended up in the hands of Colombian Marxist guerrillas, U.S. officials said on Monday.

Peru announced last week that it busted a gun-running ring that smuggled 10,000 automatic Kalashnikov rifles from Jordan to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) via the Peruvian jungle.

Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori said intelligence services had arrested six people, including three former Peruvian military officers and a Russian.

But the Jordanian government said the guns were sold to Peru legally in 1998.

"We've asked the government of Peru to provide us further information as they continue their investigation into this matter," State Department spokesman Philip Reeker said.

"Our understanding was that Jordanians were involved in a legitimate sale," Reeker told a regular State Department briefing.

On Friday, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Thomas Pickering, said the Colombian government had captured several scores of the weapons that indicated the FARC had reequipped itself.

"They have been identified as being from stocks that originally were sold by an East European country in the Communist days to the Jordanians, and which the Jordanians believed they were selling legitimately to a different Latin American country, Peru, which have in one way or another ended up in Colombia," Pickering told reporters.

Fujimori reiterated later on Friday that the Peruvian military had never purchased the guns from Jordan.

"It was common criminals -- in this case, retired or junior officers -- who carried out this arms trafficking," he told a news conference.

Fujimori says the former officers used forged documents to buy the guns in Amman, purportedly on behalf of Peru's army. They were flown in three shipments to Colombia via the Canary Islands and Peru, where they were exchanged for drugs, and later dropped by parachute to the Colombian rebels, he said.

President Bill Clinton will visit Colombia on Wednesday to back a U.S. plan to pour $1.3 billion in mainly military aid over two years into fighting drugs in Colombia, the world's largest producer of cocaine.

U.S. advisors will train and equip with helicopters two special battalions that will be able to face armed rebels involved in protecting narcotics crops and trafficking.

The FARC guerrillas earn hundreds of millions of dollars a year in drug profits to buy arms and finance a four-decades-old uprising.

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