Missiles, Farc and a Nicolas Cage film: the story of the Russian trafficker

The arms dealer is 55 years old. He was arrested in 2008 in Thailand.

Viktor Bout is known as the ‘Merchant of Death’. He had been in prison for more than ten years.

The movie ‘The Lord of the war’, starring Nicolas Cagewas largely inspired by the Russian arms dealer Victor Bout. The same one that was exchanged this Thursday by the American basketball player Brittney Grinerwho was detained nine months ago in Moscow when a liquid with cannabis.

The story of the ‘Merchant of Death’ is unusual because the former Soviet Air Force officer allegedly supplied weapons for the civil wars in South America, the Middle East and Africa.

Furthermore, it fell in 2008 in Bangkok when US DEA agents posed as Colombian guerrillas. Prosecutors in the case noted that he was about to sell up to 20 million dollars worth of weaponssuch as surface-to-air missiles, at farc.

After this, the Thai authorities extradited to the United States in November 2010 and in 2011 the Court sentenced him to 25 years in prison on terrorism charges. However, his wife Alla Bout assured that the only link her husband had with South America was the love for tangofor which he would have traveled to take dance classes.

For their part, media outlets in the Middle East mention that he was an arms dealer for Al Qaeda and the Taliban movement. Bout would have started his career in the 1990s when he built his business using military ships that had fallen out of use after the fall of the Soviet Union.

The exchange was this thursday at Abu Dhabi airport, according to the Russian Foreign Ministry. It is worth mentioning that this type of exchange has also been done before. For example, in April the Russian pilot was exchanged Konstantin Yaroshenkoimprisoned in the United States since 2010 on charges of drug trafficking in connection with the farc, by the american Trevor Reed, sentenced to nine years in prison in Russia for acts of violence that were denied.