Pakistani firms expelled from UK arms fair for selling cluster bombs

It’s very disappointing that people at POF and PDEPO didn’t take the care to check what is and is not allowed at such an event.

http://www.dawn.com/2011/09/17/uk-arms-show-expels-two-pakistani-exhibitors.html

LONDON: Two Pakistani weapons companies were expelled from a major London weapons fair after a British lawmaker discovered that cluster munitions were being advertised at their stands, the show’s organisers said Saturday.

Green Party parliamentarian Caroline Lucas said she discovered brochures promoting the weapons at a pair of Pakistani stands pitched at London’s Defence System and Equipment International exhibition held earlier this week.

Britain is a signatory to the international convention on cluster munitions, which prohibits the use, production, stockpiling or transfer of cluster munitions — the name given to weapons such as bombs or shells which pepper large areas with shrapnel or mini-explosives.

Human rights advocates say such weapons are inherently indiscriminate and often kill civilians.

The exhibition’s website makes clear that ads for such weapons are banned from the show, but Lucas said she found brochures for 155 millimeter (about 6-inch) artillery-fired cluster bombs at the Pakistan Ordnance Factory stand and Pakistan’s Defence Export Promotion Organisation pavilion.

Re: Pakistani firms expelled from UK arms fair for selling cluster bombs

Leave to Pakistanis to get kicked out of a fair, revolving around how to kill people, for displaying the most effective means of doing so... Irony!

Re: Pakistani firms expelled from UK arms fair for selling cluster bombs

POF is also controlled by our intermediate pass intellectuals.