In July of 2017, investigative journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva broke a bombshell report in the Trud newspaper, the largest Bulgarian daily newspaper. The story exposed a convert weapons shipment network to terrorist in groups in Syria via diplomatic flights, under the CIA’s watch.

Since then, the journalist says the Bulgarian authorities have interrogated her, have demanded she reveals her sources and the newspaper eventually fired her.

Following a month-long investigation, Gaytandzhieva says she found an Azerbaijan state airline was frequently transporting weapons to the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Turkey under diplomatic cover. The transportation of weaponry was, according to Gaytandzhieva, part of the CIA’s secret programme to supply anti-Assad fighter in Syria. The Bulgarian journalist says she found that the weapons made their way to al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq.

American Companies Implicated in Weapons Flights

In the report, Gaytandzhieva published a number of secret internal memos that had been leaked to her by an anonymous source.

In July this year, Trud published Gaytandzhieva’s report about Azerbaijan’s Silk Way Airlines carrying weapons with diplomatic clearance for Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Congo.
The story, which can be (1) read on Trud’s websites, notes how in December 2016, Dilyana Gaytandzhieva found and filmed nine underground warehouses full of heavy weapons with Bulgaria as their country of origin in Eastern Aleppo.

The report implicates American companies as being amongst the main customers of the “diplomatic flights for weapons” service provided by Silk Way Airline. The report states:

“According to the register of federal contracts, over the last three years American companies were awarded $1 billion contracts in total under a special US government program for non-US standard weapon supplies. All of them used Silk Way Airline for the transport of weapons. In some cases when Silk Way was short of aircrafts due to a busy schedule, Azerbaijan Air Force aircrafts transported the military cargo, although the weapons never reached Azerbaijan.”

The report goes on to state how the federal contracts registry signed a $26.7 million contract with Purple Shovel, a Veterans Administration (VA) certified service, which affords its clients with a single point of contact to transport materials and aid to anywhere in the world.