Analistas cuestionan el plan ``México seguro''

ICHNYA, Ukraine - The ammunition is stacked in mounds in a clearing, exposed to rain and sun. The crates that hold it are rotting. After more than a decade in the elements, many have ruptured, exposing high-explosive rockets and mortar fins.

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Nikolai Khalap for The New York Times

At a Ukraine arms depot, boxes of mortar rounds are starting to rot.

Weapons in Ukraine

This is the overstuffed ammunition depot behind the security fences at Military Unit A1479, a small base in the Ukrainian forest under military guard. At least 5,700 tons of ammunition, grenades and explosive powder have come to rest here, according to an unclassified NATO inventory. Almost all of it is unwanted. Much of it has expired, and some is considered too unreliable or too unsafe to use.

The scenes at Unit A1479 provide a glimpse of a dangerous legacy of the militarized Soviet state, one that has emerged as a risk to post-Soviet states and to nations far away, endangering local environments and communities and providing a reservoir of lethal materials for terrorists and armed groups.

[Though recent history has shown how fluid and dangerous the arms can be, there has been no indication or allegation that munitions from Ukraine were used in the bombings last week in London.] Huge depots of conventional weapons and ammunition remain in much of the former Soviet borderlands, many of them vulnerable to the elements, inadequately secured or watched over by security agencies with histories of corruption and suspicious arms sales. Largely unaddressed while Western nations and post-Soviet states have worked to secure and dispose of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, the conventional stockpiles pose problems as yet unsolved.

Nowhere are these problems known to be more pronounced than in Ukraine. NATO and the Ukrainian military estimate that the Soviet military left 2.5 million tons of conventional munitions here as it withdrew soldiers and arms from Europe, as well as more than 7 million rifles, pistols, mortars and machine guns. The imbalance is deeply disproportionate; the Ukrainian military now numbers roughly 300,000.

The surplus weapons and ammunition, some dating to World War I and stored in at least 184 military posts around the country, is packed in bunkers, locked in salt mines and sitting in the open air.

Shipments of the more modern matériel have left Ukraine in suspicious arms deals and reappeared in conflicts in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Western governments worry that some stocks, including explosives and portable antiaircraft missiles that can down civilian aircraft, may end up with terrorist groups.

In one deal alone, extensively documented by the United Nations and human rights organizations, the Ukrainian state arms export agency transferred 68 tons of munitions in 1999 to Burkina Faso, in West Africa. From there, they were shipped to Liberia, ending up in the hands of the Revolutionary United Front, which sacked Sierra Leone.

The delivery included 3,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles, 50 machine guns, 25 rocket-propelled grenade launchers, 5 antiaircraft missiles, 5 guided antitank missiles and ammunition.

[Ukraine has not been alone in such circuitous deals. Amnesty International released a report on July 5 that 400 tons of surplus ammunition was shipped from Albania and Serbia to Rwanda in 2002 and 2003, and then channeled to armed groups in Congo.]

Allegations of illegal arms dealing have also surrounded Trans-Dneister, the breakaway region of Moldova that according to estimates provided by Russia to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has 42,000 small arms and 20,000 tons of munitions, including aircraft bombs, rockets and 39,000 landmines.

Belarus, Georgia and the Central Asian states were similarly left with unwanted depots, although their stocks are believed to be much smaller than Ukraine's because they did not become depositories for munitions being withdrawn from Eastern Europe.

Russia, where depot explosions are reported each year, is thought to have the largest stockpiles of all, but it has been less forthcoming about them than Ukraine. One concentration is in the small Russian enclave in Kaliningrad, between Poland and Lithuania, said Aaron Karp, a consultant at the Small Arms Survey, a private research organization in Geneva. "The usual assumption is that Kaliningrad is explosive," he said.

OAXACA, Mexico, July 14 - Nearly eight months after the brother of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari was discovered smothered to death, two federal agents were arrested Thursday and charged with trying to extort millions of dollars from him.

The state attorney general in charge of the inquiry, Alfonso Navarrete Prida, told reporters on Thursday that at least four other federal agents were under investigation and that as many as eight other people were being investigated for involvement in the suspected extortion plot. The police say the effort may have gone awry and ended in the killing of the former president's brother, Enrique Salinas de Gortari. "There are more people responsible and we continue investigating who they are," he was quoted by an aide as having said at a news conference in Toluca.

The possible involvement of elite federal agents - Mexico's equivalent of the F.B.I. - in a plot to extort money from the Salinas family is the latest bizarre twist in a case that has puzzled and fascinated the country since Mr. Salinas de Gortari's body was discovered on Dec. 6 in his car in a quiet suburb of the capital. He had been beaten and smothered in what investigators say they suspect was an attempt to scare him into paying extortion money. A plastic bag was over his head.

At the time of his death, he was being sought by the French police for questioning. Interpol had put out a bulletin on Nov. 22 asking for information about his whereabouts. For several years, French investigators had been examining the financial transactions between Enrique Salinas, 52, and his eldest brother, Raúl Salinas de Gortari, who was recently released from prison after a judge acquitted him on charges of ordering the killing of a prominent politician in 1994.

Carlos Salinas de Gortari was president from 1988 to 1994 and remains a major power broker in the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the authoritarian and corrupt machine that ran the country for seven decades before being defeated in the 2000 election.

The two agents, José de Jesús Medellín Simental and Eduardo Paredes Monroy, were taken before a judge and charged Thursday with trying to use the Interpol request to extort $2.9 million from Enrique Salinas. Luis Holguín, a spokesman for the attorney general, said the agents went to Mr. Salinas's house and called him on the telephone several times asking for money.

Mr. Navarrete said at the news conference in Toluca that one piece of evidence against the agents was that the Federal Investigation Agency informed Interpol as late as the day of the killing that there was no indication Mr. Salinas was in Mexico despite the contacts agents had made with him.

Mr. Holguín said there was no evidence the two agents were at the scene of the killing or that they took part in smothering the victim.