RUSSIA: Shoulder-held missiles - effective and simple to use - are easy to come by, reports Chris Stephen in Moscow.
Western intelligence agencies may be congratulating themselves over the interception of the Igla missile sale, but the truth is air-to-air missiles are easily available in eastern Europe's arms bazaars.
On August 19th last year, a giant Russian transport helicopter was shot down over the Chechen capital, Grozny, by a rebel firing a Russian-made Strela missile. The attack was one of the worst disasters of the Chechen war, with 115 people losing their lives when the badly overloaded helicopter fell to earth in a fireball.
How the rebels got the Strela has never been explained, but the buying of weapons by Chechens from agents inside Russia's own armed forces is routine.
Strela missiles are a less sophisticated weapon than the Igla, but are freely available in the murky arms markets in Russia and other former Soviet states.
Much of the weaponry is sold, via mafia middlemen, to the Chechens by disgruntled soldiers in Russia's badly paid military.
Others may come straight from the factory: Russia and her neighbours have vast weapons industries, a legacy of Soviet times. Many factories are at full productivity, after Moscow concluded half a dozen huge arms sales agreements, including a £7 billion deal with India signed two years ago. All of which means there are lot of weapons to police.
While shoulder-launched air- to-air missiles have proved a constant menace to Russian helicopters in the Chechnya war, they are also a major headache for the West. Much of the money to finance Chechen forces comes from the Middle East and there are fears that arms supplies flow the other way.
Just this week, the US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, said that the Chechen rebel leader, Shamil Basayev, was being put on the official list of terrorist threats to the United States. The move allows US officials to raid bank accounts in America thought to be used to aid the Chechens.
Moscow has long claimed that the rebels are backed by Middle Eastern terrorist groups. The latest evidence of links comes from the similarities in design of suicide belts worn by Chechen "Black Widows" suicide bombers and Palestinian bombers in Israel.
Formations of Middle Eastern volunteers continue to fight alongside Chechen units. Basayev's former second-in-command, killed in fighting against Russian forces, was a Saudi Arabian.
America tried and failed to shut the arms pipeline last year, sending commandos into neighbouring Georgia. The units moved into the Pankisi Gorge to close down Chechen base camps, but the rebels simply moved their operations into the mountains.
Georgian forces have proved unwilling to follow them.
The sort of missiles available on the arms market are older-generation Soviet models. They have little use against military targets, which employ shielding, but they can be deadly against civil targets. Civil airliners have huge heat signatures on which the missiles home.
They are particularly vulnerable when taking-off and landing, when their slow speed and proximity to earth make them easy targets for even the oldest generation of missiles.
British troops recently ringed Heathrow after intelligence indicated terrorists were preparing to shoot at an airliner.
An Israeli passenger jet was lucky to escape when two missiles were fired at it shortly after it took off from Kenya.
Missiles are not the only headache: Russia is also awash with spent nuclear fuel and weapons, idea for making a "dirty bomb" together with thousands of tonnes of chemical weapons.
America has been financing a programme to destroy these weapons, but only a much larger programme, aimed at collecting all dangerous material and regulating the arms markets, is likely to have a lasting effect.
All of which means this week's sting by intelligence agencies should be little cause for comfort: there are still plenty of weapons out there somewhere.