STAFF at one of the Australian Defence Force's largest weapon storage facilities have for years allegedly been involved in stealing and rebirthing military issue firearms and selling them to outlaw motorcycle gangs.
The claims are made in secret police intelligence documents that have been leaked to The Australian.
Despite the seriousness of the allegations, no one has been identified or charged over the allegations.
The documents show that Defence officials knew almost a decade ago that the National Storage Distribution Centre, at Moorebank, in Sydney's southwest, had become a target for
numerous thefts of machine guns and automatic assault rifles.
The confidential report says that "staff in the armoury" at the Moorebank centre were involved in the theft and rebirthing of military firearms and some staff "were in collusion with outlaw motorcycle gangs".
"The Army Intelligence and Security Unit has indicated that problems have been experienced in weapon storage units ... and
between 1980 and March 1994 there were 104 separate incidents of theft of firearms," the report says. Although Australian Federal Police were called in to investigate, not only has no one been charged, but none of the weapons have been recovered.The revelations about the extent of the thefts and the failure to recover the weapons comes as NSW and federal police continue their hunt for six stolen rocket launchers which, with the suspected help of a bikie group, allegedly ended up in the hands of a criminal gang and an accused terror suspect, Mohammad Elomar.
The Australian has also discovered that NSW police had seized another rocket launcher from a gang in Sydney's southwest in 2001. Members of the strikeforce hunting for the missing weapons are now going back over police files to determine whether that rocket launcher is linked to the others.
A Defence spokeswoman said that investigations in 1999 into the weapon thefts had not "concluded that any Steyr (assault rifles) ... were lost, stolen or missing".
However, there was criticism about Defence's poor practices and procedures in relation to storage, distribution and disposal of weapons......
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