BANGKOK (AP)

The mystery of an aircraft seized in Thailand with a cache of North Korean weapons deepened further yesterday when a senior Thai police officer said it was not headed to Iran as some reports have indicated.

The five-man crew charged with illegal arms possession also insisted their destination was Sri Lanka and not Iran when it was seized in the Thai capital where it made a refuelling stop, their lawyer said yesterday.

Defence lawyer Somsak Saithong told the Associated Press shortly after visiting the jailed crew that they also denied any knowledge of accused international weapons trafficker Victor Bout, who is in the same prison battling attempts to be extradited to the United States on terrorism charges.

There has been much speculation since it was impounded December 12 about where the plane was headed and whether it was linked to Bout.

"They told me they don't know Victor Bout," Somsak said. He quoted the five men, four from Kazakhstan and one from Belarus, as saying that their flight plan called for a refuelling stop in Bangkok before flying on to Sri Lanka.

Police Colonel Supisarn Bhadd-inarinath, acting chief of the Crime Suppression Division, said that investigators have so far found no evidence that the aircraft was bound for Iran or any link between Bout and the arms seizure.

But according to a flight plan seen by arms trafficking researchers, the aircraft was chartered by Hong Kong-based Union Top Management Ltd., or UTM, to fly oil industry spare parts from Pyongyang to Tehran, Iran, with several other stops, including Bangkok, Colombo in Sri Lanka, Azerbaijan and Ukraine.

Thai authorities, acting on a U.S. tip, impounded the Ilyushin Il-76 cargo plane after uncovering 35 tons of weapons, reportedly including explosives, rocket-propelled grenades and components for surface-to-air missiles. The plane's papers described its cargo as oil-drilling machinery for delivery to Sri Lanka.