WASHINGTON ASKS PERU ABOUT JORDANIAN GUNS IN COLOMBIA

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- The United States asked Peru for information about
Soviet-era guns sold by Jordan that ended up in the hands of Colombian
Marxist guerrillas, U.S. officials said on Monday.

Peru announced last week that it busted a gun-running ring that smuggled
10,000 automatic Kalashnikov rifles from Jordan to the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia (FARC) via the Peruvian jungle.

Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori said intelligence services had arrested
six people, including three former Peruvian military officers and a Russian.

But the Jordanian government said the guns were sold to Peru legally in 1998.

"We've asked the government of Peru to provide us further information as
they continue their investigation into this matter," State Department
spokesman Philip Reeker said.

"Our understanding was that Jordanians were involved in a legitimate sale,"
Reeker told a regular State Department briefing.

On Friday, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Thomas
Pickering, said the Colombian government had captured several scores of the
weapons that indicated the FARC had reequipped itself.

"They have been identified as being from stocks that originally were sold
by an East European country in the Communist days to the Jordanians, and
which the Jordanians believed they were selling legitimately to a different
Latin American country, Peru, which have in one way or another ended up in
Colombia," Pickering told reporters.

Fujimori reiterated later on Friday that the Peruvian military had never
purchased the guns from Jordan.

"It was common criminals -- in this case, retired or junior officers -- who
carried out this arms trafficking," he told a news conference.

Fujimori says the former officers used forged documents to buy the guns in
Amman, purportedly on behalf of Peru's army. They were flown in three
shipments to Colombia via the Canary Islands and Peru, where they were
exchanged for drugs, and later dropped by parachute to the Colombian
rebels, he said.

President Bill Clinton will visit Colombia on Wednesday to back a U.S. plan
to pour $1.3 billion in mainly military aid over two years into fighting
drugs in Colombia, the world's largest producer of cocaine.

U.S. advisors will train and equip with helicopters two special battalions
that will be able to face armed rebels involved in protecting narcotics
crops and trafficking.

The FARC guerrillas earn hundreds of millions of dollars a year in drug
profits to buy arms and finance a four-decades-old uprising.