assistance from the PLO largely dried up in the mid-1980s after the PLO had forged stronger links with the government of the Republic of Ireland. AG-3 rifles from Norway were also secretly obtained. Last arms deals In the late 1980s and 1990s, the Provisional IRA South Armagh Brigade smuggled in a number of Barrett M82 and Barrett M90 .50 BMG rifles from the United States. These weapons were used by two South Armagh sniper teams to conduct a sniping campaign against British Army patrols operating in the area. The last British soldier killed in Northern Ireland during The Troubles, Stephen Restorick, was shot dead by a sniper in South Armagh in February 1997. Soon after, in April 1997, the leader of one of the sniper squads, Michael Caraher, and other IRA volunteers were arrested and a Barrett rifle seized. A bolt-action .50 BMG rifle stamped with the word 'Tejas' (Spanish for Texas) on the butt manufactured by a former Barrett gunsmith based in Texas. was also recovered in Belfast in August 1993; British security forces believed it had been used in attacks in preceding months and dubbed it the "Tejas Rifle." Earlier, in August 1986 Gardaí had intercepted an arms consignment in the Central Sorting Office in Dublin that included an Barret M82 and ammunition, posted from Chicago. Despite its ceasefires of 1994 and 1997 the IRA continued to buy arms. It needed a new source of weapons, since the Libyan pipeline had been closed and smuggling from the United States became far more difficult due to its transatlantic gunrunning network in the country being disrupted by American authorities in the early 1980s. In May 1996, the Federal Security Service (FSB), Russia's internal security service, publicly accused Estonia of arms smuggling, and claimed that the IRA had contacted representatives of Estonia's volunteer defence force, Kaitseliit, and some non-government groups to buy weapons. However the Russian report did not say when the contacts had taken place. In July 1999, three men, Anthony Smyth, Conor Claxton, and Martin Mullan, along with an accomplice, Siobhan Browne, were arrested by the American FBI and ATF agencies and accused of buying 44 handguns from arms dealers in Florida in the United States and posting 15 of the weapons to Ireland and the United Kingdom. Later estimates put the number of guns sent to Ireland at more than 100 pistols and machine pistols. All three men