#Lord of war trial#

As far as some aid agencies were concerned, on occasion Bout was the swiftest supplier of relief to disaster zones. Doubtless Bout will one day be the subject of a film himself, played perhaps by Russell Crowe in a bad moustache, dark glasses and baseball cap Bout rarely allows himself to be photographed.ДЄs far as he was concerned, he was purely a businessman, providing an international freight service stripped of any ideology. Amnesty International has commended the film for highlighting the baleful effects of the arms trade. Yuri Orlov, the character played by Nicholas Cage in Lord of War, the 2005 film about the international arms trade, is said to be modelled on Bout. He has also flown peacekeepers for the UN to Somalia and aid to Sri Lanka, after the 2004 tsunami, and been accused of supplying the Liberian warlord, Charles Taylor. 'In an age when the US president has divided the world into those who are with the United States and those who are against it, Bout is both,' wrote Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun, authors of Merchant of Death, the investigation into Bout which they published last year. After 2001, he worked for the US government and its civilian suppliers, shipping goods into Iraq on their behalf. Initially, he provided cheap freight routes to whomever would pay, whether the Angolan government or Unita rebels, the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan or their Taliban opponents. Soon he was flying arms to any government or militia that wanted them and filling his Antonov cargo planes with less lethal wares, from gladioli to diamonds, for equally lucrative return trips. As a smart and opportunistic 25-year-old, he took advantage of three converging factors after the collapse of the USSR: the sudden availability of cheap, clapped out Soviet airforce planes, a massive stockpile of weapons and spare parts guarded only by underpaid and disgruntled servicemen, and the burgeoning demand for arms from countless conflict areas around the world. He just came back to Thailand today.'Д«out's story is a classic end-of-the-cold-war morality tale. 'We have followed him for several months.

#Lord of war trial#

'We will take legal action against him here, before deporting him to face trial in another country, likely the US,' said Major General Pongpat Chayaphan, the commander of Thailand's crime suppression division. It is understood that DEA agents posed as arms buyers acting on behalf of Farc.

Accused of flouting UN arms embargos and wanted by Interpol, he was eventually arrested on a warrant issued by a Thai court acting on information from the US Drug Enforcement Administration. This time Bout is accused of attempting to buy arms and explosives for leftwing Farc rebels in Colombia but the charge sheet could have listed half a dozen countries where governments might like to interview him. Pursued for years by the intelligence services of the world, and tracked for months by Thai detectives, yesterday the elusive 41-year-old was finally arrested in a five star hotel in Bangkok. He has as many aliases as an AK-47 has rounds, and has acquired the nicknames Merchant of Death and Lord of War. His clients have included the Taliban and the US government, African warlords and the UN.

A former Russian lieutenant, he became one of the world's biggest arms dealers, flying his ancient Soviet planes into battlefields from Liberia to Afghanistan.

If Viktor Bout did not exist, a thriller writer would have invented him.