US wins two-year fight to extradite ‘merchant of death’ from Thailand
One of the world's most prodigious arms dealers, dubbed the Merchant of Death, was extradited to America today after a two-year legal battle.
Viktor Bout, a 43-year-old Russian, was escorted to a plane at Bangkok airport by eight American federal agents.
The former Soviet air force officer was arrested at a Bangkok hotel in March 2008 as part of a sting operation led by FBI officers posing as Colombian Farc rebels wanting to buy arms.
He has allegedly supplied weapons that fuelled civil wars in South America, the Middle East and Africa, with clients including Liberia's Charles Taylor and Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and both sides in Angola's civil war.
Russia immediately protested, with its foreign ministry saying the extradition had no legal justification. But Thailand's Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva said his Cabinet had approved the extradition.
The head of a lucrative air transport empire, Bout had long evaded UN and US sanctions aimed at blocking his financial affairs and restricting his travel. He claims he ran a legitimate business and never sold weapons. He fought hard to avoid extradition.
His wife Alla appeared outside the Bangkok prison to see her husband before he left — but she was too late. "This is an unequivocally political decision, lobbied by the US government," she said. "It has no legal basis whatsoever.
"This is clearly a decision taken under US pressure because only several days remained until Viktor's term was up and, under the law, he was supposed to be freed because, from the legal point of view, we had every ground to win this case."
Both Moscow and Washington exerted heavy pressure on Mr Abhisit's government.
Russia says Bout is an innocent businessman and wants him in Moscow. But experts say Bout has intensive knowledge of Soviet military and intelligence operations and that Moscow does not want him going on trial in the US.
In August last year a Thai court rejected Washington's request for Bout's extradition on terrorist charges. That ruling was reversed by an appeals court in August and the US sent a plane to stand by to bring him out quickly. The extradition came just before a deadline that might have let him walk free.
