The arms dealer, who served as an exchange currency with the American basketball player Brittney Griner, served in the United States a sentence of twenty-five years in prison.
By Marie Jégo
Triomphal return to Russia for Viktor Bout, the arms dealer exchanged against the American basketball player Brittney Griner, Thursday, December 8, on the tarmac of Abu Dhabi airport, in the United Arab Emirates. As soon as the exchange was discussed, the Russian television channels showed it on a private jet leaving for Moscow, making his tension checked, phoning his family. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed his release after eleven years spent in the United States where he was serving a sentence of twenty-five years in prison for arms trafficking and support for terrorism.
The former soldier, 55, known abroad as the “death merchant”, who fueled the bloodiest conflicts in the Middle East and in Africa, is described, at home, like a patriot unjustly Imprisoned by an American administration viscerally anti -Russian. The fact of having acoquinated with the Taliban, Al-Qaida, the former Liberian president Charles Taylor, who purges fifty years in prison in the United Kingdom for crimes against humanity and war crimes, the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi , is not disqualifying in Russia, on the contrary. The media describe him as a refined, vegetarian, painter in his spare time. His paintings were also recently exhibited by the Federation Council, the upper room of the Parliament. The lower room, the Duma, invited him to deliver a speech soon.
His ascent is as dazzling as it is mysterious. Translator for the Soviet army in Angola and Mozambique in the late 1980s, the lieutenant end chose to embark on business when the USSR collapsed in 1991. In Russia at the time, many military military pilots Are unemployed, planes are soil and the defense industry has stocks to resell. In a few years, this obscure military interpreter will create the most extensive network of arms deliveries to civil wars and dictatorships, especially in Africa, easily playing the UN sanctions. Its empire – $ 6 billion in 2008, according to Associated Press – is a skein of opaque companies that are impossible to disentangle. Above all, no one knows with which funds he launched his business.
not looking at customers
In 1992, aged 25, he bought two Antonov from the ex-Soviet army. Officially, to transport flowers, furniture, frozen chickens. Air traffic is organized from South Africa, then the United Arab Emirates. The success is immediate. Four years later, the company has 160 planes and a thousand employees. Viktor Bout is not looking at customers. In 1995, the cargo – 30 tonnes of weapons – which he chartered by plane for the Afghan chef Burhanuddin Rabbani fell into the hands of the Taliban, his enemies. During negotiations for the release of the crew, he took the opportunity to sell their services to them.
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