Fixer in Sky News arms trafficking says he was tricked

Aurelian Szanto, the fixer in the Sky News arms trafficking story, claimed he was tricked into believing the feature shot was a documentary. Moreover, Szanto, who was brought to the DIICOT headquarters for hearings on Wednesday, said he could file a complaint against the Sky News journalists.

Private broadcaster Sky News aired a feature report on arms trafficking in Europe, which was shot in Romania and featured four alleged arms dealers. On Wednesday, the prosecutors with the Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT) conducted searches at seven locations in Targu Mures and Bistrita Nasaud and investigated the alleged arms dealers, Szanto included. Investigations showed that the arms featured, which were presented by journalists as military-grade weapons, were in fact lawfully owned and were used for hunting.

“They asked me to show them military-grade weapons. My message to them was no, I cannot offer you military-grade weapons. They assured me it is a documentary that will be broadcast in December. It will not be a news piece, it won’t be something that will be aired on TV and will damage Romania’s image. We negotiated on thousands of euros, but not many,” Szanto told journalists.

“I was contacted via someone who has contacts at the Sky trust, if I am available to film a documentary in Romania in connection to arms trafficking carried out on the entire East-European continent. That person told me it was a documentary the Sky trust will shoot in Europe in connection to arms trafficking, to inform the public. They told me: we want there to be two people who will show us some guns. By presenting those weapons we will draw awareness on the way these sales are carried out. I have a friend whom I knew, who had hunting rifles, I called him from England and asked him whether he agrees to make this documentary, not for free, of course. A payment for acting, for presenting, and I would receive my payment for translating,” Aurelian Szanto said.

The journalist who traveled to Romania, Sky New Chief Correspondent Stewart Ramsay, denied staging the feature report. In a phone interview for broadcaster Digi24, Ramsay said he had got in touch with an arms trafficking gang that operated in Albania, Serbia and Bosnia, but the meetings fell through, due to lack of trust. Instead, the reporter said, he got in touch and met, after nine months of negotiations, with a Romanian citizen who was a “family member of a crime gang”.

According to DIICOT head Daniel Horodniceanu, “until now, what we expected from the beginning – a script, which I believe was staged by British journalists – is confirmed.” According to local Romanian news sources, the individuals featured in the report received money for their services. Reportedly, Ramsay paid the alleged gun dealers EUR 2,000 for their role in the feature report. Moreover, the sources claim, he also provided the four Romanian citizen with equipment, such as vests, and wrote the lines they used while being filmed.

Georgeta Gheorghe