Where is viktor bout

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The Notorious Mr Bout review — straight-shooting tale of arms dealer 3 out of 5 stars. Published: 14 Aug Viktor Bout associates exploited flaws in international law, UN study finds.

Published: 17 Jul Viktor Bout sentenced to 25 years by US court - video. Published: 6 Apr Russia condemns US sentence for arms dealer Viktor Bout. Viktor Bout sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Published: 5 Apr In the fall of , four years after the Rwandan genocide, Bout began transporting arms to Rwanda. Mirchev contracted with the Rwandan government to supply arms, and Bout ferried them from Burgas to Kigali.

Employees passing through Kigali stayed at the InterContinental hotel, where Bout had rented all the rooms on the top two floors. But not all the arms stayed in Rwanda. At the time, Congo was not under sanctions; nevertheless, Bout and Mirchev contributed to a conflict that ultimately entangled eight African nations.

The flights landed in either Goma or Kisangani, eastern Congolese cities where Rwandan-backed militias were strong. His fleet included almost thirty aircraft, and he was a multimillionaire employing some three hundred people. At one point, Air Cess ranked second, after Lufthansa, in the volume of cargo shipped into and out of Sharjah.

And no one was doing anything to stop him. Hain saw British soldiers in Sierra Leone coming under increasingly sophisticated attacks and ambushes. The weapons used by rebels, many of them drunk or stoned boys, had evolved from machetes to AKs. The U. In December, the U.

Plausible deniability is a tenet of faith in the arms business. I did it. I understood my limits. Ten months later, the U. Army veteran, in Sharjah, where Chichakli had operated a tax-free enclave. Chichakli had since established an accounting practice in Richardson, Texas.

After the U. Russian authorities failed to hand over Semion Mogilevich, a Ukrainian wanted by the F. The case eventually collapsed. Nevertheless, Bout felt the pressure from abroad. Any assets in the U. That morning, F. No criminal charges were filed, however, and a week later Chichakli flew to Russia, where he has been living ever since.

Soon after the raid, Department of Defense officials entered the names of the companies under sanctions into their databases. His planes had flown dozens of times in and out of Baghdad, according to flight records, and Bout was profiting from it. The Pentagon eventually voided the relevant contracts, but, by then, the war in Iraq had helped Viktor Bout get back on his feet.

Though Bout had avoided the press while he was abroad, he became a media sensation in Russia. After the Belgian warrant was issued, he appeared on Echo Moskvy, a popular radio station.

During a televised interview, he insisted that he had never interacted with Taliban leaders, but the interviewer pressed him, and two minutes later he sighed and acknowledged having met Mullah Omar. During the same interview, he said that he had never trafficked weapons and no longer worked in the aviation sector. At the time, he was operating an avionics facility northwest of Moscow.

It was becoming increasingly difficult to separate his actions from his myth. Not long after Bout moved to Moscow, U. Peter Danssaert, of the International Peace Information Service—a think tank in Antwerp focussed on arms transfers—also spent years tracking Bout, but he, too, did not come across any proof of criminality. Whether Bout had withdrawn from the weapons trade or simply gone underground, the U.

Even so, he found ways to game the system. You can make a very decent living solely because your name appears on the OFAC list. I can testify to that firsthand. Three sat, abandoned, in the Emirates. One of them, a hulking Ilyushin, had been turned into a billboard for the Palma Beach Hotel in Umm al-Quwain, thirty miles northeast of Dubai.

Bout wanted to establish a low-cost airline in Russia, comparable to JetBlue, but was unable to raise sufficient capital in cash. With narrower horizons, Bout bought five acres in Maykop, a Russian town near the Black Sea, where he planned to develop an organic farm producing arugula and goat cheese. Now, as a counterterrorism adviser to President George W. Bush, he wondered what else could be done to stop Bout.

Weeks earlier, agents from the D. Zarate sat down with Mike Braun, the D. Zarate offered Braun a steak dinner if his guys could pull it off. The D. The undercover agents would insist on meeting Bout somewhere outside Russia, and catch him on tape discussing a shipment of surface-to-air missiles to the FARC, for the purpose of killing American troops in Colombia. For decades, Washington has backed the Colombian government, sending American commandos, agents, and intelligence officers to assist police and military officials there.

If Bout went along with the deal, it would prove that he remained in the weapons trade, and place him in potential violation of four federal statutes: conspiring to kill U. It is one of only a few countries to do so. He and Bout had not seen each other in nearly a decade, though they had stayed in touch through e-mails and phone calls. Lately, Smulian had begun corresponding with Bout about prospective investments in Tanzania, including building a casino, importing cashews, and supplying the Tanzanian military with helicopters, tanks, and ships.

In November, , the D. Mike Snow, a Congo-based businessman who was friendly with both Smulian and Bout through the aviation industry, had become a D.

Snow wrote an e-mail to Smulian. Bout replied four hours later. What is needed??? You can proceed. One operative, a convicted Colombian cocaine smuggler who called himself Ricardo, spoke only Spanish; the other, called Carlos, spoke English, and did most of the talking.

He knew how to build a case, having worked with the U. He also knew the world of drugs and guns. Born in Guatemala, Carlos had joined the Army there in the early nineties, then moved into military intelligence.

He soon began trafficking drugs, moving, by his estimate, more than six thousand pounds of cocaine. He eventually turned himself in and presented his services to the D. At the tiki bar, Carlos and Ricardo told Smulian that they were eager to acquire Iglas—Russian-made shoulder-fired missiles—to target helicopters flown by American pilots.

Carlos insisted on meeting the Russian. But, from what Smulian understood, that protection applied only inside Russia. Smulian needed to talk it over with the Russian. It was a cold and overcast morning, and Bout was wearing a striped sweater and a long brown coat. Both men had aged since their last meeting. Bout was more than forty pounds overweight, with a puffy face and short brown hair that stood on end. Bout drove Smulian into Moscow in a black Mercedes. Sign up to receive the daily top stories from the National Post, a division of Postmedia Network Inc.

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