The Justice Department alleges that an illegal immigrant from China shipped weapons to North Korea from California.
According to a new federal complaint filed in the Central District of California, Shenghua Wen, as well as other unnamed co-conspirators, “successfully exported at least two shipments of firearms and ammunition to North Korea by concealing the items inside shipping containers that were shipped from Long Beach, California, through Hong Kong, China, to North Korea.”
Federal agents on Aug. 14 seized from Wen’s home in Ontario, California, “two devices that Wen admitted he procured to send to the North Korean government for its military use,” court documents say.
Those items were a “Serstech Arx mkII Pharma device — a chemical threat identification device” and “an ANDRE Deluxe Near-Field Detection device,” which the complaint explains is “a handheld broadband receiver that detects known, unknown, illegal, disruptive, or interfering transmissions” and, according to the manufacturer, is “portable, non-alerting, and ideal for locating hidden eavesdropping devices.”
On Sept. 6, federal agents also seized 50,000 rounds of 9mm ammunition from Wen’s van parked outside his home that the defendant allegedly “admitted he procured to send to North Korea at the direction of North Korean government officials,” the complaint says. Prosecutors said Wen is “a Chinese national who is illegally in the United States and is therefore prohibited from possessing any firearms or ammunition.”
The complaint says Wen entered the United States in 2012 on a student visa and stayed in the United States illegally once his visa expired. During interviews with investigators, Wen allegedly admitted that he met North Korean government officials at two separate North Korean Consulates in China before he came to the United States and was directed to procure goods on behalf of the North Korean government, likely because they knew he was “good at smuggling.”
