Last week we told you about the curious case of the Gulfstream G2 Jet registered with Belize call letters, V3-GRS.
It made news when the Venezuelan military destroyed it on January 24th - after it was intercepted on an illicit mission into their airspace.
Turns out that it was a drug plane confiscated in Belize four years ago - when it landed off the Coastal Road with a massive drug cargo - flown in, as history would have it, from Venezuela.
Government confiscated the plane and then sold it to a group out of Cozumel, Mexico. They had it parked in Belize for years being repaired to make it airworthy.
The Mexicans flew it out of Belize on January 14th - and 10 days later it was running an illicit operation to Venezuela.
Successive administrations of the government of Belize have had a long standing practice of selling these jets for a few hundred thousand dollars - basically knowing that they will probably end up right back in the narco-world - because the planes have a very tainted registration.
But that practice has now stopped - likely at the insistence of the US.
Today the Home Affairs Minister said that they should have an across the board policy to destroy all such planes:
Kareem Musa, Minister of Home Affairs
"These planes, it's my personal position that these planes ought to be destroyed. It is often times discussed in the National Security Council that perhaps the best way to deal with these illicit aircrafts is to destroy them because while it is in the short-term you may gain some money from the sale of it, at the end of the day if it keeps coming back to the country it's not going to be good but I can say and this is probably going to be no new news to the criminals if they are the ones buying from the people that we sell to that these planes are actually monitored so that could very well be the reason why this plane was destroyed or shot in Venezuela because these aircrafts are actually monitored once they're sold."
"You might sell it to an upstanding person but then that person turns around and might sell the aircraft after that and so I think that's several layers of checks that will have to be done but at the end of the day my personal position is that these planes ought to be destroyed."
According to our reports, government has destroyed three of these planes: two that were stranded in the Crooked Tree area and one in the Monkey River Area.
We note that the Belize registration for this jet expired on January 20th, 4 days before it turned up, and went down in Venezuela.
The UDP issued a statement yesterday calling for no less than a Commission of Inquiry into the sale of the jet. A release says "This matter requires urgent and serious attention as the country's very reputation is at stake...the UDP recommends the convening of a Commission of Inquiry to answer national security questions surrounding the return of a seized plane to the drug cartels."
At this point, we might want to gently note that - according to our information - this jet and two others were sold to the same group during the UDP years. Currently only one jet remains and it's at the BDF airwing.
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