For more than a dozen years a fleet of ancient Antonov aircraft owned by the former Russian military officer Viktor Bout would land on the precarious desert and jungle airstrips in conflict zones around the world.
With access to vast piles of ex-Soviet weapons, he armed the Taliban and the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone, Charles Taylor's regime in Liberia, Unita in Angola, various Congolese factions, and Abu Sayyaf, a militant Islamic group in the Philippines. In Africa the arms were paid for with diamonds.
At the same time, after 2001, his fleet was also hired by the US and its contractors to ship goods into Iraq and by the UN for relief flights to Somalia and post-tsunami Sri Lanka.
With hindsight it seems extraordinary that he could have operated for so long. He was first outed as a "merchant of death" by a British minister in 2000 and named by the UN in the same year as a major sanctions buster in Africa's civil wars. Arrest warrants were issued in 2002 by Belgium – where his first fleet was based until it was moved to South Africa – and then Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates.
But even when the UN froze his assets and ordered a travel ban, his planes – displaying the flags of Liberia and the Central African Republic – kept flying. Bout himself returned to Russia where he clearly enjoyed high-level protection. The Russian Federal Security Service issued a statement in 2002 saying: "There is no reason to believe that this Russian citizen has committed any illegal actions."
Trained as an interpreter at the Military Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow, Bout went into business after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, with half a dozen languages at his command and as many passports. He is variously described as having been born in the Soviet republics of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, or Ukraine. He is married and has a daughter who lives in Spain.
The years of impunity must have damaged his antennae for danger when he flew into Thailand last year, ostensibly for a holiday, and into the clutches of the US Drug Enforcement Administration.
