Alleged Russian Arms Dealer Gives Interview

Victor Bout, the Russian businessman accused of illegally trading arms with the Taliban and Al Qaeda terrorists, dropped into a central Moscow radio station Thursday for a live 37-minute interview, but Russian law enforcement officials made no move to arrest him.

Bout offered the rare interview to the Echo of Moscow station, the city’s only liberal radio outlet. After denying all involvement in illegal arms trafficking, he walked out of the station and disappeared onto the streets of Moscow.

“What should I be afraid of?” Bout said on air. “I haven’t done anything in my life to worry about so that I would need to hide and run away. I came to your studio without any precautions.”

U.S. and Belgian officials had suspected that Bout was in Russia, but just hours before the interview, Interpol’s Moscow bureau said the chances he was in the Russian capital were minuscule.

Bout is wanted by Belgian authorities on a money-laundering charge; U.N. reports accuse him of illegal arms trading in Africa.

Bout said he is willing to cooperate with Russian Interior Ministry police. But a ministry spokesman said late Thursday that police weren’t seeking to arrest Bout, because they have no evidence of any wrongdoing.

“We are still checking Victor Bout out,” ministry spokesman Andrei Polyakov said. “So far we haven’t discovered anything to arrest him for.”

The unofficial Russian view is that the alleged link between Bout and Al Qaeda is not proven and that the U.N. reports provide no basis for prosecution.

Earlier in the week, Interpol’s Russia bureau sent international evidence against Bout to the Russian prosecutor general’s office, which will make a decision on whether to open a criminal case and arrest him.

“It is very difficult to say what will eventually happen to Bout in Russia--whether he will be detained or not. At this stage, the Bout story is still full of gaps and question marks,” Interpol bureau spokesman Igor Tsirulnikov said.

The reluctance of Russian authorities to detain Bout for questioning Thursday underscores the difficulty international authorities may face in pinning him down.

It wouldn’t be the first time foreign law enforcement agencies have been frustrated by Russia’s tangled crime-fighting bureaucracy.

Swiss authorities have been trying to prosecute Pavel P. Borodin, a onetime Kremlin insider accused of money laundering. But those efforts have been stymied by a lack of cooperation from Russian authorities.

Alexei Venediktov, Echo of Moscow’s editor in chief, a highly respected Russian broadcaster, said Bout, of medium height and wearing a mustache, appeared cheery and upbeat Thursday.

“Victor Bout was in a very cheerful mood, smiling and joking,” Venediktov said.

Only a couple of photographs of Bout are available. But media reports that he has never given an interview are inaccurate: He spoke to Russia’s NTV television about two years ago.

In the interview Thursday, Bout reflected that it was funny that Interpol was looking for him when “here I am in your studio. They haven’t been able to find me for a long time now--four or five years.”

Bout has been accused of funneling guns to fighters throughout Africa, sometimes supplying both sides in a conflict.

Bout told Echo of Moscow he had been in the transportation business since 1992 and that it was his primary business.

“I deal exclusively with air transportation. And I have never been involved in arms trade. I have never taken part in it,” he insisted.

He said the claims that he supplied Osama bin Laden with weapons, including nuclear weapons components, were like something out of a Hollywood thriller.

Asked whether he had Al Qaeda links, Bout said the claims were “monstrous” and unsubstantiated.

“I can say only one thing: I have never supplied anything, and I haven’t done anything and haven’t entered any contacts with either Taliban representatives or with Al Qaeda representatives,” he said.

Bout admitted that his planes regularly flew cargo to Afghanistan, but he insisted that it was only to airfields controlled by the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. Russia was one of the major arms suppliers to the Northern Alliance, and Bout’s role in supplying anti-Taliban moujahedeen was already known.

Bout said that when a client ordered a plane and paid by the hour, the cargo was determined not by the cargo carrier but by his client.

“That is why you need to clarify the question about carrying weapons to Afghanistan,” he said. “We flew quite a lot in Afghanistan and worked there until the Taliban captured all the airfields, which in their time were controlled by what is now called the Northern Alliance.”

He said part of his problem is unfavorable Western stereotypes of Russians.

“If a Russian businessman works somewhere abroad, he is very easily labeled as ‘Russian,’ next comes the word ‘Mafia,’ then ‘weapons,’ then something else,” he complained. “It is very difficult to fight it off.”