Two years ago, Italian police had a wiretap on a black market arms dealer, when a call came in from a Libyan army officer, looking to buy 500,000 AK-47s, and 10 million rounds of ammo for them. The Italian gangsters were not used to moving that many weapons, but were game to act as middlemen for such a deal.
The gangsters got in touch with Norinco and started making arrangements.
Everything was going well until the Italian police arrested the gunrunners two months ago, as part of another case. The Italians always planned to arrest the gangsters before the deal went through, but were willing to just continue collecting data, to try and find out what Libya wanted with so many weapons. That's still a mystery, because the gangsters never asked, and the Libyans never said anything about who would get the weapons.
Libya, which has only 76,000 active troops in its military, has a long history of supporting shady African rebel groups, which would be a reasonable guess as to the final destination for all of these AKs. Or maybe they'll be showing up at a "gun show loophole" near you.
