U.S. doesn’t confirm plans to buy weapons stolen from Libyan military depots

PanARMENIAN.Net - U.S. technical specialists delegated to Libya to find weapons left over from Gaddafi regime revealed round 5,000 surface-to-air shoulder-fired rockets, the State Department said.

“It’s difficult, in fact, to say how many MANPADS there are. We’re in the process of trying to evaluate how many of those are still in existence and some of the sites where these weapons were held were a major target of NATO air strikes. We support the Libyan Government as it works on this – what they call the DDR plan, which is to disarm, demobilize, and reintegrate the militias. It’s clearly a high priority for them,” State Department spokesperson Mark Toner said.

However, asked about the veracity of talks that State Department is going to buy some weapons stolen from military depots in the chaos of unrest, Toner responded quite blurry, neither confirming nor denying the information.

“I just would say that as we deal with the challenge of destroying MANPADS, we are looking at a variety of methods,” he said.