Tag: Mexico

It looks like the North Koreans are up to no good off the coast of Mexico:

North Korea on Wednesday said Mexico has “forcibly detained” one of its ships months after it ran aground off Mexico’s Gulf coast last year, and Pyongyang blames the United States for making sure the ship is not released.

 North Korea’s deputy permanent representative to the U.N. told reporters that his country will take unspecified “necessary measures to make the ship leave immediately.”

An Myong Hun said the Mu Du Bong is strictly a commercial ship and that more than 50 crew remain on board.

A U.N. panel, however, has reported that the ship is controlled by a company that has tried to evade U.N. sanctions imposed in response to North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs.

The panel’s recent report says the Pyongyang-based Ocean Maritime Management Co. has simply renamed most of its vessels to avoid detection. Nuclear-armed North Korea has a history of using front companies for that purpose.  [Associated Press]

You can read the rest at the link, but the article does not say what the ship was transporting.  The ship was coming from Cuba so it probably had sugar in it maybe hiding illicit cargo like the ship the Panamanians detained in 2013.  I have always believed that these ships that these sanctioned ships should be auctioned off instead of given back to the North Koreans.  That would actually significantly hit the Kim regime in the pocketbook.

You can read more at NK News that believes the intent of this ship was simply to test the UN sanctions put in place after what happened with the prior ship in 2013.

I have not discussed the Andrew Tahmooressi case here on the ROK Drop because of how little information there is out there about it. The usual suspects have been using it to bash the Obama administration, but now people need to seriously consider if he intentionally drove into Mexico with those weapons:

If the judge throws the case out on technical grounds, we’ll probably never know for sure whether Tahmooressi was telling the truth when he claimed that he crossed the border by accident after making a wrong turn out of a parking lot in San Ysidro.

But if the trial goes on, that question will be very much at issue. To find Tahmooressi guilty, the judge will have to determine that he intended to break the law by bringing military-style weapons and ammunition into Mexico, which has strict anti-gun laws.

In May, sources showed the arrest video to a reporter for Tijuana’s fearless weekly magazine Zeta.

In a story headlined “Ex-Marine did not enter Mexico by mistake,” Ines Garcia Ramos reported that around 10:30 p.m. on March 31, as Tahmooressi began to drive into Mexico, border officers who noticed a mattress and other large items in his truck waved him over to an inspection area, where his weapons were discovered during a search. Contrary to his assertion that he stopped to ask how to return to the U.S., she wrote, he appeared to be driving away from the border. (After his guns were discovered, he called 911, telling an American operator he had crossed the border “by accident … and they’re trying to take my guns from me.”) (LA Times)

You can read more at the link, but before Tahmooressi drove into Mexico he walked across the border earlier in the day and checked into a hotel. So if he had no intention of driving into Mexico then why did he check into a hotel and then go back to get his truck?