Blackwater founder violated UN arms embargo on Libya
Mercenary Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater and close to former US President Donald Trump, violated the United Nations arms embargo on Libya in 2019, according to a confidential UN report released Friday by The New York Times and The Washington Post.
The report, which is before the UN Security Council, reveals that Prince deployed a small force of heavily armed Western mercenaries in eastern Libya in the service of rebel commander Khalifa Haftar, head of the Libyan National Army (LNA).
The operation cost approximately $80 million, according to the report, and was aimed at deposing the UN-recognised government based in Tripoli, then led by Fayez al Sarraj.
The mercenaries acquired drones, speedboats, night vision goggles and equipment to intercept enemy communications.
They also tried to buy three AH-1F Cobra military helicopters with high weapons potential, delivered by the US to Jordan, but officials in Amman aborted the deal, derailing the operation.
The mercenaries had arrived in Libya in the spring of 2019, during a Libyan National Army offensive on Tripoli that ended up failing due to the arrival of Turkish troops in support of the UN-recognised government.
When the operation failed, the mercenaries, some British, Australian, South African and American, fled in the boats to Malta.
Erik Prince famously founded Blackwater (now called Academi), a paramilitary company that he sold to an investment group in 2010 and which was implicated in gross human rights violations during the US invasion of Iraq last decade.
In fact, four Blackwater contractors were sentenced to varying prison terms, and one of them, Nicholas Slatten, to life imprisonment, for the murder of 14 civilians in Iraq in 2007, while Prince headed the company.
In his last days in office, Trump pardoned all four contractors.
Prince was an enthusiastic ally of Trump's during his 2016 White House campaign, to which he donated heavily; he had ties to controversial strategist Stephen Bannon, as his sister, Betsy DeVos, was the former president's education secretary.