Who is Viktor Bout, the “merchant of death” who was traded for basketball player Brittney Griner

Viktor Bout was known as one of the world’s most prominent arms dealers. Also by his nickname: “the merchant of death.”

The Russian citizen has just been released into the US as part of a prisoner exchange with the Moscow government, which released the American professional basketball player Brittney Griner.

Look: Russia and the United States exchange basketball player Brittney Griner for Russian trafficker Viktor Bout

The player had been detained since February this year after authorities at the Moscow airport found cannabis oil, an illegal substance, in her luggage.

Rumors had circulated in the US media for months that top State Department officials had tried to secure Griner’s release in exchange for Bout.

As a former Soviet Air Force officer with a fearsome nickname, her notorious personality has inspired books and a Hollywood movie.

air business

Bout is a Russian citizen born in Soviet-ruled Tajikistan.

He began his career in air transport in the early 1990s, after the fall of the USSR.

According to a 2007 book, “Merchant of Death,” written by security experts Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun, Bout built his business using abandoned military aircraft at the airfields of the collapsing Soviet empire in the early 1990s.

Brittney Griner was sentenced to nine years in prison by a court in Russia in August. (Reuters)

The robust Antonov and Ilyushin planes were for sale along with their crews and were perfect for delivering goods on bumpy wartime airstrips around the world.

Bout was suspected of being trafficking arms through a series of mirror companies war-torn countries in Africa.

Journalistic investigations in the Middle East pointed to him as trafficker for al Qaeda and the Taliban. He denied having collaborated with those groups, but acknowledged that he sent weapons to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban.

He also claimed to have helped the French government transport goods to Rwanda after the genocide and to have transported UN peacekeepers.

In 2003, British Foreign Secretary Peter Hain coined the nickname “merchant of death”.

After reading a report on him, Hain said: “Bout is the main merchant of death, the main conduit for aircraft and supply routes that carry weapons… from Eastern Europe, mainly Bulgaria, Moldova and Ukraine, to Liberia and Angola”.

“The UN has exposed Bout as the center of a web of shady arms dealers, diamond brokers and other agents who wage wars.”

Your fall into a trap

Bout’s business ended in 2008, the year he was arrested in thailand after falling for a US intelligence hoax.

DEA drug enforcement agents posed as potential suppliers for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The guerrilla group – now dissolved – was classified as a terrorist organization by the United States.

Bout was extradited to the US in 2010. (GETTY IMAGES)

Bout was persecuted for being a guerrilla arms dealer. The Russian always claimed that he was simply a businessman with a legitimate international shipping business.

But a jury in New York did not buy his story.

It was sentenced to 25 years in prison in April 2012 after being found guilty of conspiring to kill US citizens and officials, launching anti-aircraft missiles and aiding a terrorist organization.

At his three-week trial, Bout was heard to have been told the weapons would be used to kill US pilots working with Colombian authorities. Prosecutors said he was saying: “We have the same enemy.”

The United States took action against Bout throughout the 2000s, freezing his assets in 2006, but there was no law under which he could be prosecuted in the United States.

Instead, US agents bided their time until 2008, when they posed as FARC arms suppliers.

Bout said the US case against him was politically motivated.

GETTY IMAGES

According to the testimony of Alla Bout, his wife, the Russian traveled to South America not with the intention of trafficking arms. but of “taking tango classes”.

Russian authorities supported him throughout his legal proceedings, with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov vowing to fight to secure his return to Russia, calling the decision by the Thai court that extradited him to the US “unfair.” and politically motivated.

The 2005 film titled “The Warlord,” loosely based on the life of the arms dealer, has the anti-hero escaping justice at the end.

With the trade for basketball player Grainer, Bout finally came to that end, though not in the way Hollywood envisioned.

Source: Elcomercio