Militiaman who took gun to US Capitol riot jailed, Beyonc to re-record offensive Renaissance lyric, Hundreds still missing amid Kentucky flash floods, BP sees biggest profit in 14 years as bills soar, Man's 11m bid to dig up tip for binned Bitcoin, More research needed on climate extinction threat. 2022 BBC. "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.". 2022 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. Bout claimed he was simply an entrepreneur with a legitimate international transport business, wrongly accused of trying to arm South American rebels - the victims of US political machinations. Bout - a Russian national born in Soviet-ruled Tajikistan - began his career in air transport in the early 1990s, after the fall of the USSR. From Latin Victor. Five things that held women back in football in England, Griner case throws spotlight on hostage diplomacy. Bout was extradited from Thailand to the US after efforts by Russian diplomats to have him released failed. This page was last edited on 16 October 2021, at 17:39. According to a 2007 book - Merchant of Death, by security experts Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun - Bout built up his business using military planes left on the airfields of the collapsing Soviet empire in the early 1990s. To al Qaeda? Bout has said that he worked as a military officer in Mozambique. Now, at the center of that bid is Bout, a man who eluded international arrest warrants and asset freezes for years. "I've never touched diamonds in my life and I'm not a diamond guy and I don't want that business. Bout -- who reportedly has used names including "Victor Anatoliyevich Bout," "Victor But," "Viktor Butt," "Viktor Bulakin" and "Vadim Markovich Aminov" -- is thought to have been the inspiration for the arms-dealer character played by Nicolas Cage in the 2005 movie "Lord of War.". "[Bout is a] businessman, dealer and transporter of weapons and minerals [who] supported former President Taylor's regime in [an] effort to destabilise Sierra Leone and gain illicit access to diamonds," UN documents state. Who is Viktor Bout, the Russian arms dealer known as 'merchant of death'? "He was a Soviet officer, most likely a lieutenant, who simply saw the opportunities presented by three factors that came with the collapse of the USSR and the state sponsorship that entailed: abandoned aircraft on the runways from Moscow to Kiev, no longer able to fly because of the lack of money for fuel or maintenance; huge stores of surplus weapons that were guarded by guards suddenly receiving little or no salary; and the booming demand for those weapons from traditional Soviet clients and newly emerging armed groups from Africa to the Philippines," Farah told the magazine. US could swap Russia arms dealer for Griner, The troubling tale of a vanished basketball star, Brittney Griner pleads guilty to Russian drugs charge, US kills al-Qaeda leader in Afghanistan drone strike, Tensions spike as Pelosi's Taiwan visit looms, World one misstep from nuclear annihilation - UN, Helping children to overcome the trauma of war. He also claimed to have helped the French government transport goods to Rwanda after the genocide, and to have transported UN peacekeepers. That group - which has since disbanded - was classified as a terrorist organisation by the United States. In an interview with the UK's Channel 4 News in 2009, he flatly denied ever dealing with al-Qaeda or the Taliban. Hungarian leaders aide who quit over race mixing remarks said his words have a chilling potential, Hungarian leader was criticised by Xavier Bettel in 2021 for introducing homophobic law, Some 75% of imports will be banned and Sberbank ejected from Swift but Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia to keep supplies, US conservatives are signaling their commitment to authoritarianism loud and clear by holding this years Conservative Political Action Conference in Budapest the first-ever outside the US, Its one thing to enjoy the ex-advisers attacks on the PM, another to read his line on autocrats, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every But a jury in New York didn't believe his story. Shortly after the undercover officers discussed arms shipments to Farc with Bout, Thai authorities arrested him and lengthy legal proceedings began to bring him to the US. Take our quiz How rangers use AI to help protect India's tigers, Kenya election: Split loyalties in battleground area, When Delhi and London colluded to deny passports to Indians, This curious geographic transaction has been going on for more than 350 years, The youngest in the labour market have a slew of demands. He said that Bout graduated from the Military Institute on Foreign Languages, a well-known feeder school for Russian military intelligence. But he did admit to flying arms to Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, saying they were used by commanders fighting against the Taliban. Agents from the DEA posed as potential buyers from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as Farc. But law enforcement agencies pursued him throughout the 2000s. He defied Donald Trump - what happens now? The trial honed in on Bout's role in supplying weapons to FARC, a guerrilla group that waged an insurgency in Colombia until 2016. On the same day, Griner testified in Russian court as part of her ongoing trial on drug charges following her February arrest at a Moscow airport. Viktorm (genitive singular Viktora, nominative plural Viktorovia, declension pattern of chlap). The 31-year-old US player has been in custody since February after Moscow airport officials found cannabis oil in her luggage while she was returning to the US after playing in Russia. He is also alleged to have armed both sides in Angola's civil war and supplied weapons to warlords and governments from the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo to Sudan and Libya. Others have said it was actually Angola, where Russia had a large military presence at the time, Farah told CNN. Read about our approach to external linking. Instead, US agents bided their time until 2008 when they posed as buyers for Colombia's Farc rebels and gained an introduction to Bout through one of his former associates. But such an ending has eluded Bout, who has remained in prison in the US since his conviction in 2012. -- and he denied each claim. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison in April 2012 after being found guilty of conspiracy to kill Americans and US officials, delivering anti-aircraft missiles and aiding a terrorist organisation. Taylor was jailed for war crimes and is serving his sentence inside a UK maximum security prison. Rise of the far right: will there be an election bonanza for Europes populists? He is believed to be in his 50s, with his age in dispute because of different passports and documents. 'Justice has been delivered': Biden says US killed al Qaeda leader, Indigenous lawmaker calls Queen Elizabeth II a colonizer during ceremony, Viktor Bout's attorney says prisoner swap would be a 'fair trade.' Farah told Mother Jones magazine in 2007 that according to his multiple passports, Bout was born in 1967 in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, the son of a bookkeeper and an auto mechanic. First recorded as a a Swedish given name in 1640 as Victor. (CNN)The future of two American citizens detained in Russia could hinge on the release of a convicted Russian arms dealer, nicknamed the "Merchant of Death" by his accusers, whose life story inspired a Hollywood film. Whelan was arrested on alleged espionage charges in 2018 and sentenced to 16-years in prison in a trial that US officials have called unfair. But Bout's history in the arms trade extended much further afield. In the same year, British Foreign Office minister Peter Hain coined the nickname "merchant of death". 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So notorious are the exploits of the former Soviet air force officer that they have inspired a Hollywood film and garnered him an impressively fearsome nickname - the merchant of death. Trump shares CPAC Hungary platform with notorious racist and antisemite, Conservatives want to make the US more like Hungary. The US made moves against Bout throughout the 2000s, freezing his assets in 2006, but there was no law he could be prosecuted under in the US. He first became known when the United Nations began investigating him in the early-to-mid 1990s and the United States began to get involved. Did he supply rebels in Africa and get paid in blood diamonds? Viktor Bout, one of the world's most infamous arms dealers, is back in the news - this time as part of a possible prisoner exchange for American basketball star Brittney Griner. Russian authorities have called for Mr. Bouts return since his 2011 conviction. How much for Depp's drawings? Previous reporting by Ashley Hayes and CNN staff. The UN named him as an associate of former Liberian President Charles Taylor - who was convicted in 2012 on charges of aiding and abetting war crimes during the Sierra Leone civil war. Viktor Bout spent more than two years in a Bangkok jail. Bout was extradited from Thailand to the US in 2010, after a sting operation by the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) two years earlier. It is thought Bout travelled under several aliases, moving through countries such as the United Arab Emirates and South Africa before resurfacing in Russia in 2003. He has been accused of assembling a fleet of cargo planes to traffic military-grade weapons to conflict zones around the world since the 1990s, fueling bloody conflicts from Liberia to Sierra Leone and Afghanistan. Bout - who was 45 when he was sentenced - is said to have begun channelling weapons through a series of front companies to war-torn parts of Africa. Media reports in the Middle East claimed he was a gun-runner for al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Definition from Wiktionary, the free dictionary, A transliteration of the Russian male given name, https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Viktor&oldid=64244916, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
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