THE British Labour Party has called for an inquiry into reports that top secret papers found at a military base in Zaire indicated a British firm was involved in selling arms to Hutu rebels.
Arms and highly classified documents, including bank records, were said to have been found by a BBC reporter.
The report claims they indicate that a British company supplied large amounts of arms and ammunition to the former Rwandan government during and after its genocide of a million people in 1994.
Mr George Foulkes, shadow overseas development minister, called for an inquiry into the reported discovery of the documents and demanded that a statement be made in the House of Commons yesterday.
The revealing documents were said to have been discovered on Sunday on a bus at Sake, 18 miles east of Goma, close to an abandoned Hutu refugee camp.
They show an Isle of Man company trading as Mil Tec Corporation sent the former government rifles, ammunition, grenades and mortar bombs worth more than £3.3 million between April and July 1994, according to yesterday's edition of the Times.
The documents include a letter asking the exiled Rwandan government's "minister of defence" to pay debts totalling $1,962,375, and details arms shipments, invoices and air bills. It allegedly reads: "We have supplied your ministry for more than five years ... you will realise that we have gone out of our way to assist your ministry in times of need."
A United Nations embargo on arms sales to Rwanda was imposed on May 17, 1994, five weeks after the genocide started. The series of shipments by Mil Tec allegedly began on April 17, the newspaper said, and included bullets, grenades, machine gun ammunition, rifle bullets, mortars, AK47 rifles, rifle magazines, rockets and rocket launchers.
The shipments were made from both Albania and Israel, the Times said. Mil Tec allegedly tried to circumvent the UN embargo by sending the weapons to Goma, just across the border in Zaire. Most of the shipments had Zairean end user certificates.
The shipments might have broke the UN embargo, but were not against British laws, as the arms allegedly supplied by the company did not travel through British territory, British trade and industry officials said yesterday.
Patsy McGarry adds: The Irish human rights group Afri has condemned "in the strongest possible terms" what it described as "this complicity in genocide by a British arms company and by extension, the British government." In a statement, it asks "what does the Irish Government in its presidency of the European Union have to say about a European partner actually fuelling the genocide that shocked the world in 1994?"
The Green Party MEP, Ms Patricia McKenna, said news about the British arms company "highlights once again the sinister nature of the arms trade".
The National Platform group has attacked France, saying it bears "prime political responsibility for the current central African mayhem." It calls on Irish public opinion not to permit "the Europhiles in Iveagh House" to get away with "further connivance with French scheming in central Africa, as they effectively have been doing for the past two years."