Brazilian man convicted in scheme to smuggle machine gun parts to Brazil, feds say

A Brazilian man has been convicted in a scheme to smuggle machine gun parts from the United States to Brazil, authorities said.

Victor Waldeck Oliveira Iglesias, 31, was found guilty by a federal jury of one count of conspiracy to commit an offense against the U.S. and one count of attempt to smuggle goods from the U.S., the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida said Thursday.

Prosecutors said an ATF Miami investigation found Iglesias and co-defendant Alvaro Teixeira, 50, conspired to send eight sets of HK firearm parts to Brazil, were they could have been assembled into fully automatic assault rifles.

The had planned to conceal the illegal gun parts in shipments that were otherwise legally licensed for export, and intended to smuggle more if successful, authorities said.

A search warrant was executed at Iglesias’s apartment where authorities discovered eight HK gun kits in a large box prepared for shipment, officials said.

After Iglesias’s arrest, Teixeira delivered 10 additional firearm parts kits to a person he believed was a buyer in the parking lot of Dolphin Mall, authorities said.

Teixeira was sentenced to 24 months in federal prison on March 10 after pleading guilty to the same charges as Iglesias.

Iglesias faces up to 5 years in federal prison on the conspiracy count and up to 10 years on the attempted smuggling count at sentencing, scheduled for May 4.

“This case involved an effort to secretly move machine gun components out of the United States and into the international black market,” U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones for the Southern District of Florida said in a statement. “The evidence at trial showed that the defendants planned to conceal these parts inside legitimate export shipments and send them overseas, where they could be assembled into fully automatic firearms. Thanks to the work of ATF agents and our law enforcement partners, this scheme was stopped before those weapons reached the streets.”