Posted on August 20, 2010 - by Venik
Viktor Bout: five passports, half a dozen languages and alleged friend to all sides
Viktor Bout, so-called ‘merchant of death’, is accused of supplying arms to al-Qaida, the Taliban and Charles Taylor
The Nicolas Cage movie Lord of War may have been based loosely on the life of Viktor Bout, but little is known about the so-called “merchant of death”.
According to the alleged arm smuggler’s five passports, he was born in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, in 1967, the son of an accountant and a car mechanic. He graduated from the Soviet Union’s military institute for foreign languages and is believed to speak half a dozen languages.
By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, Bout was either a lieutenant or major, according to various accounts. With hundreds of military planes stranded on Soviet runways because of a lack of parts and fuel, and millions of guns, bullets, grenades and rockets lying abandoned in poorly guarded arsenals, Bout is said to have acquired a small private air force of transport planes to deliver weapons. He allegedly got hold of far more sophisticated arms, such as sniper rifles and sights, and guided missiles and sold to many sides in many conflicts.
Bout has been accused of arming the Taliban and the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone, Charles Taylor’s regime in Liberia, Unita in Angola, various Congolese factions, and Abu Sayyaf, a militant Islamic group in the Philippines. After 2001 his fleet was hired by the US and its contractors to ship goods into Iraq and by the UN for relief flights to Somalia and post-tsunami Sri Lanka.
He was first described as a “merchant of death” by the then Foreign Office minister Peter Hain in 2000. “The UN has exposed Bout as the centre of a spider’s web of shady arms dealers, diamond brokers and other operatives, sustaining the wars,” Hain said.
Bout was named by the UN as a major sanctions buster in some of Africa’s civil wars. Belgium issued arrest warrants in 2002. The same year the Russian FSB, the successor to the KGB, said there was no reason to believe he had committed “illegal actions”.
In a Channel 4 interview last year, Bout denied trading with al-Qaida or the Taliban. He confessed, however, to flying arms to Afghanistan in the mid-1990s. He also claimed to have assisted the French government in transporting goods to Rwanda after the genocide, and carrying UN peacekeepers.
He is married to Alla Bout and has a daughter who lives in Spain.
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