Posted on Sunday, March 16 @ 12:45:20 ICT 
Bout maintained that he was in Thailand merely on holiday and strenuously denies
that he was conducting a lucrative arms deal, involving missiles and rocket
launchers, with FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, whom his
lawyer, Lak Nitiwatvichan, denied are terrorists - "They are just rebels
standing on the opposite side to the government," Lak maintained.
The
Thai police are currently attempting to garner more incriminating evidence
before Bout's case is passed over to the prosecutors in approximately two
months. They are also seeking to co-operate with their Russian counterparts to
freeze Bout's assets.
Bout is being charged with "seeking or gathering
assets for terrorism", a charge which Lawyer Lak further denied, claiming his
client was not involved with terrorist groups like Al Qaeda or Jemaah Islamiah.
This despite a well-established claim by Washington's International Consortium
of Investigative Journalists in 2002 that Bout had sold millions of dollars
worth of weaponry to the Taliban in the late 1990s and it is also asserted by
some US and UN officials that Bout made his first deal with the Taliban in 1996
in the United Arab Emirates. He is also alleged to have used his airline "Air
Bas" to ferry Taliban and al-Qaida gold out of Afghanistan to Karachi, Iran, the
UAE, and Khartoum after the rout of the Taliban.
"Viktor B", so called due to
his use of at least five aliases and variant spellings of his surname, is a
polyglot who speaks at least five languages and has been dubbed the world's
premier illegal arms merchant. He was described in 2000, by Peter Hain, the then
British Foreign Office Minister responsible for Africa, as "the chief sanctions
buster and…a merchant of death." He is known to have been involved in numerous
arms deals in many African countries, the Philippines, the Lebanon and
Afghanistan, amongst other countries; often playing off one side against
another.
The US is keen to extradite him to America to face charges relating to his
arms dealing with FARC, but will have to wait until the Thai process of law has
reached its conclusions. However, in a situation reminiscent of the US's
dealings with Saddam Hussein, there is a compromising situation relating to
Bout's immunity, as he has also contracted for the US military, transporting US
military personnel to Afghanistan and flying material into Baghdad International
airport for the US occupation forces in 2004. The fact that DOD contractors had
subcontracted to Bout companies is indisputable and was reluctantly acknowledged
by Paul Wolfowitz, while at US Department of Defence
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