London, April 24 (IANS) A British businessman has been found guilty of selling “golf ball finders” worth $20 for $40,000 apiece as “bomb detectors” to countries in the war zone, including Pakistan. He made $75 million during the Iraq war alone, a court was told.
James McCormick, a 57-year-old former policeman, was found guilty of fraud at the Old Bailey for selling bogus bomb detectors to countries in the war zone where hundreds of people were dying and being injured by explosive devices, The Independent reported Wednesday.
He was released on conditional bail and will be sentenced May 2.
His maximum profits were from the war in Iraq, which had become a byword for terrible suffering. He sold the devices to the Baghdad government in for years, earning $75 million.
McCormick had claimed the “detectors could trace “everything from explosives to elephants” including narcotics, different types of fluids, gemstones, ivory and hidden people.
They were able to operate, he maintained, through walls, underwater and underground.
In reality the equipment was useless. A series of scientists who had tested the various models found nothing to justify the claims being made for them by McCormick’s company, around the world.
Pakistan, Lebanon, Mexico and Thailand, states which faced murderous criminal and political violence, were other customers.
There are allegations that in at least one of the markets, Iraq, there was bribery on a staggering scale to secure the deals.
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