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“Merchant of death” arrested in Thailand

Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout

London/Bangkok: If Viktor Bout did not exist, a thriller writer would have invented him. A former Russian lieutenant, he became one of the world’s biggest arms dealers, flying his ancient Soviet planes into battlefields from Liberia to Afghanistan. His clients have included the Taliban and the U.S. government, African warlords and the United Nations. He has as many aliases as an AK-47 has rounds, and has acquired the nicknames Merchant of Death and Lord of War. Pursued for years by the intelligence services of the world, and tracked for months by Thai detectives, he was finally arrested in a Bangkok hotel on Thursday.

This time Bout is accused of attempting to buy arms and explosives for left-wing FARC rebels in Colombia. Accused of flouting U.N. arms embargos and wanted by Interpol, he was eventually arrested on a warrant issued by a Thai court acting on information from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

“We will take legal action against him here, before deporting him to face trial in another country, [most] likely the U.S.,” said Pongpat Chayaphan, the commander of Thailand’s crime suppression division. Bout’s story is a classic end-of-the-cold-war morality tale. As a smart 25-year-old, he took advantage of three converging factors after the collapse of the USSR: the sudden availability of cheap Soviet air force planes; a massive stockpile of weapons and spare parts guarded only by underpaid servicemen, and the burgeoning demand for arms from countless conflict areas around the world. As far as he was concerned, he was purely a businessman, providing an international freight service stripped of any ideology.

As far as the then British Foreign Office Minister Peter Hain was concerned, when he denounced him in the U.K. Parliament in 2000, he was a “merchant of death,” cynically fuelling the civil wars in Africa. — ©Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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