Files recovered from the late Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s secret police office in Tripoli bare new evidence of his regime’s dealings with Viktor Bout. The documents reveal repeated warnings from British intelligence officials to former Libyan intelligence chief Musa Kusa in 2003 about Bout’s plans to expand his business interests there.
Meanwhile, roused by the guilty verdict against Bout in New York last Wednesday, the Russian foreign ministry is now talking openly of trying to bring the convicted arms dealer back to the “motherland.”
—AP, By Stephen Braun, “The documents, which indicate Bout was trying to expand his operations in Libya, add fresh intrigue to questions about whether he played a role in Gadhafi’s rush to bolster weapons caches in the years before the recent uprising that drove him from power.”
—Reuters, “Our goal is to try to succeed in bringing him to his motherland,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said in a statement, declining to say how Russia would carry this out.”
—AP, By Larry Neumester and Stephen Braun, “The most bankable star witness at the trial of an ex-Soviet officer known as the Merchant of Death was a former drug dealer turned U.S. government-sponsored actor who became one of the highest paid informants in history.”