SAN FRANCISCO, May 18 (OneWorld) - The U.S. government has lost track of over 200,000 machine guns that were supposed to be used by the Iraqi police, according to a prominent human rights watchdog calling for tougher international regulations on arms dealings.

The 99-ton cache of AK47s was to have been secretly flown to Iraq in 2004 from a U.S. base in Bosnia, but there is no proof that the four plane loads of arms ever arrived, said Amnesty International in a report released last week.

According to the report titled "Dead on Time," private arms brokers working for the Pentagon clandestinely shipped hundreds of thousands of weapons and tens of millions of rounds of ammunition from Bosnia to Iraq between July 2004 and June 2005. During those shipments, at least 200,000 Kalashnikovs went missing after passing through the hands of private contractors from a half dozen countries.

"The principal U.S. contracting firm had to use a broker in Croatia that was not known to the Croatian government," said Amnesty's arms control expert Bryan Wood. "They then used a freight forwarding agent in Bulgaria. They contracted a cargo company that had broken the UN embargo on Liberia and also flew an aircraft out that didn't have air operating authorization."

Reached by telephone, officials at the Pentagon would not comment for this story.

The United States is not the only country that engaged in clandestine arms dealings around the Iraq war, added Wood. "Dead on Time" documents how European governments tried to surreptitiously ship 158 tons of ammunition, a sophisticated man-portable short-range missile system, and a radar truck to the Persian Gulf "almost certainly for use in the invasion of Iraq before that invasion had been announced."

"The U.S. government and its allies used a private Danish shipping company to conceal arms deliveries," the report charges. After picking up civilian equipment in Belgium, a Danish cargo ship named the Karin Cat made extra stops in Britain, France, and Italy.

On its way to the Persian Gulf, the ship foundered in rough conditions in the Mediterranean Sea midway between Malta and the island of Crete.

According to Amnesty, "The ship had departed on 27 January from Antwerp (Belgium) bound to Doha (Qatar), a major U.S. military hub for operations in support of the Iraq invasion, where it was expected to arrive on 6 March. As the U.S. and UK governments denied any decision to invade Iraq, the captain tried to conceal the cargo from the Danish safety inquiry."

The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq began on March 20, 2003. Amnesty, along with other international organizations, is calling on the United Nations to strengthen rules that govern arms trafficking worldwide.

According to the humanitarian group Oxfam International, there are currently no global standards for governments' regulation of arms exports and no international requirements for governments to link guns to their location--whether military stockpile, police depot, or civilian home.

This is an especially big problem, says Oxfam, because 12 billion bullets are produced every year--enough to kill everyone in the world twice.

Oxfam, Amnesty, and the London-based International Action Network on Small Arms have joined forces in the Control Arms Campaign to lobby governments to establish an Arms Trade Treaty.

They and other human rights groups have pinned some of their hopes for tougher regulations on a United Nations Summit scheduled to begin June 26th in New York.

Oxfam lobbyist Greg Puley told OneWorld that the 2006 UN Small Arms Review conference will help usher in a new level of agreement "on basic principles--such as you don't sell weapons to people who will use them to commit human rights abuses or other atrocities."

Puley said the European Union--along with a host of African, Asian, and Latin American nations--have already endorsed this position. The Chinese government's position is unknown. The Bush Administration, he said, "hasn't blocked progress."

"It's certainly in their interest," Puley added, "to stop people from selling arms to people who plan to use them for terrorist acts."