20 December 2013

Procurers of Pilfered Parts Must Pay

A Georgia airplane restoration company has reached a settlement with federal prosecutors in Alaska over old and abandoned aircraft parts its salvagers took without permission from a crash site on federal land near Fairbanks.

The restorers -- Douglas, Georgia-based B-25 Group LLC -- paid the U.S. Bureau of Land Management $55,000 to settle a five-year investigation into their unauthorized use of public land, according to a written statement Thursday from the Alaska U.S. Attorney's Office. The parts they took were left on the Tanana Flats south of Fairbanks from the crash of an F-82 Twin Mustang nearly six decades earlier, the federal prosecutors said.

F-82E Twin Mustang at Adak Island, Alaska, 1948 (USAF)

"B-25 Group initially asserted the parts had been lawfully acquired from a salvage yard in Fairbanks," the statement says.

Read the rest here.

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