The cluster that keeps going and going and going....

An update on Fast and Furious

Mexico says US man smuggled grenade parts

PHOENIX (AP) — Police have arrested an American man who allegedly smuggled parts for as many as 2,000 grenades into Mexico for drug cartels, more than a year after he was released by U.S. agents who stopped him at the Arizona-Mexico border for having more than a hundred grenade parts.

While a Department of Justice official said the case will be added to the investigation of Operation Fast and Furious, a flawed effort by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to target gun-trafficking networks on the Mexican border, there is a twist: in the Jean Batiste Kingery case, the U.S. Attorney's Office, not ATF, appeared to be responsible for letting him walk.

...Cerasi said Kingery was detained on June 15, 2010 at the San Luis port of entry on the southwestern Arizona-Mexico border after more than 100 disassembled grenades were found hidden in a spare tire in his vehicle.

The next day, "the suspect confessed to his involvement in arming these cartels with hand grenades," teaching cartels how to convert AK-47 and AR-15 rifles into automatic weapons and to sometimes delivering instructions, including assassination orders, to cartel operatives.

Wait, I thought AR-15s and AK-47s were fully automatic weapons. I mean that's what the NY Time, et all say.

An ATF agent "practically begged" a prosecutor at the U.S. Attorney's Office in Phoenix for permission to arrest Kingery but was denied, according to Cerasi, who wrote that the agent "was horrified with the thought of releasing this individual, who, in his opinion, was engaged in terrorist-like activity." Cerasi's group is a professional association, representing exclusively federal law enforcement officers...

...Kingery had been on ATF's radar screen since January of 2009 when he bought multiple AK-47s at a Tucson gun shop. Online grenade parts sellers reported that Kingery was buying from them in large numbers in October of that same year.

...Mexico's Attorney General's Office said Kingery had been the subject of "a bilateral investigation" between Mexico, the U.S. government and the ATF.

The office said Kingery, 40, allegedly bought weapons parts and grenade casings in U.S. stores and even over the Internet, and smuggled them into Mexico through the border city of Mexicali.
The office said Kingery was arrested late last week in the Pacific Coast city of Mazatlan, in Sinaloa state, in a raid on a house where five guns were found. He is being held under a form of house arrest...

Not only rifles but explosives. Talk about the gang that couldn't shoot straight. Is it 2012 yet?