หมายเหตุ: เราได้ตัดสินใจที่จะดำเนินการนำข่าวเวอร์ชั่นเก่าออกตามสำนักข่าวนิวยอร์ค ไทมส์ โดยสาเหตุที่ไม่แน่ชัด, นิวยอร์ไทมส์ได้ทำการตัดทอนข้อมูลบางส่วน และได้เพิ่มเติมข้อมูลบางส่วนกับข่าวชิ้นนี้ ระหว่างช่วงเวลาไม่กี่ชั่วโมงก่อนหน้านี้
ข่าวชิ้นนี้ป็นข่าวจาก The New York Times บอกเล่าถึงความสำเร็จของรัฐบาลสหรัฐฯในการทำให้ศาลไทยส่งตัวพ่อค้าอาวุธชาว รัสเซียกลับไปดำเนินคดีที่สหรัฐฯ แต่ในขณะเดียวกันก็ทำให้ทางการรัสเซียผิดหวัง รายละเอียดบางส่วนของการค้าอาวุธดังกล่าวยังปรากฏในหนังฮอลลีวู๊ดเรื่อง "The Lord of War" และ "Merchant of Death"
ในรายงานระบุว่ากรณีดัง กล่าวได้ทำให้ประเทศไทยอยู่ในฐานะกระอักกระอ่วนเพราะต้องตกที่นั่งเป็น กรรมการกลางระหว่างประเทศรัสเซียและประเทศสหรัฐฯ รายงานยังระบุด้วยว่าจากข้อมูลของสายลับที่นายเบ้าท์ได้พูดคุยด้วยเมื่อสอง ปีก่อนเผยว่า เขาสามารถนำส่งอาวุธนำวิถีพื้นสู่อากาศจำนวน 700-800 ลูก, ปืนเอเค-47 จำนวน 5,000 กระบอก, กระสุนปืนนับล้านๆลูก, กับระเบิด, ระเบิดซีโฟร์และรวมไปถึงเครื่องบินบังคับจากระยะไกล
Thai Court Rules to Extradite Arms Suspect to U.S.
By THOMAS FULLER
The New York Times
Published: August 20, 2010
BANGKOK — Viktor Bout, a Russian businessman who is expected to face gun-running charges in the United States following his extradition from Thailand, expressed confidence on Friday that he would ultimately be exonerated.
Sukree Sukplang/Reuters
Related: The Lede Blog: The 'Merchant of Death' Diet Plan (August 20, 2010)
“We will go to court in America and we will win,” Mr. Bout told a reporter from Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency after a Thai court ordered the extradition.
Mr. Bout, who inspired the movie “Lord of War,” starring Nicolas Cage, is suspected of running a large-scale trafficking organization that provided weapons to governments, rebels and insurgents across the globe.
The court decision on Friday, which overturned a lower court’s ruling from August 2009, was a victory for the Obama administration, which summoned the Thai ambassador in Washington to the State Department this week to “emphasize that this is of the highest priority to the United States,” a spokesman said.“There have been a lot of conversations of senior administration officials with their Thai counterparts about this,” said one American official, who spoke on condition of anonymity after staying up until 2 a.m. awaiting the news from Bangkok. American officials had feared that Russian pressure would prevail and Mr. Bout might be flying home.
“This really was a welcome surprise,” the official said of the court’s decision.
Russia, which had been seeking to prevent Mr. Bout from being placed in the American legal system, reacted angrily.
“We regret what, in my view, is an illegal political decision taken by the appellate court in Thailand,” Sergey V. Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, said Friday, according to the Interfax news agency. “Based on the information we have at our disposal, the decision was made under very strong outside pressure. This is lamentable.”
He vowed to do everything necessary to ensure Mr. Bout’s return to Russia.
The decision culminated a decade-long effort by the United States to bring Mr. Bout, 43, to trial. “The Clinton folks started it, the Bush administration continued it and Obama finished it,” said Douglas Farah, the co-author of a book about Mr. Bout, “Merchant of Death,” and a fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center in Washington.
Mr. Farah said the United States began pursuing Mr. Bout in the 1990s after officials became alarmed that he was making conflicts more deadly by showering warring parties with weapons on an unprecedented scale, including weapons as sophisticated as attack helicopters.
“They became aware in the mid-1990s that he had fundamentally altered the way wars were being waged,” Mr. Farah said. “He was flying in planeloads of this stuff. There was a lot of alarm that we were facing something new. It was the privatization of warfare.”
After the ruling, Mr. Bout embraced his wife and daughter, who wept. He said nothing to reporters in the courtroom as he was led out in leg irons. The court ordered his extradition within three months.
Later, outside the courthouse, his wife, Alla, denounced the ruling. “This country is not fair,” she said as she smoked a cigarette. “This is a political case. I wish they hadn’t involved my husband in it.”
Mr. Bout’s lawyers had argued that the extradition request was part of a pattern of the United States’ reaching beyond its borders to punish its enemies. Chamroen Panompakakorn, Mr. Bout’s principal lawyer, alluded to the rendition of terrorist suspects by the American government and argued that the overall credibility of the United States government had been tarnished after the failed search for unconventional weapons in Iraq.
Mr. Farah said the dogged effort to bring Mr. Bout to trial proved just the opposite, that the United States could work through normal channels to achieve justice. “One of the big lessons here is that you can do something like this through the judicial process,” Mr. Farah said.
He continued: “Everything can be presented in court. You won’t have the mumbo jumbo secret stuff that damages the government’s credibility.”
A panel of judges sided with the defense in August 2009 and wrote in their decision that Mr. Bout’s “guilt cannot be determined in Thailand.”
The court on Friday did not contradict this, but said there was enough evidence to extradite Mr. Bout to the United States.
“This case has to be further pursued in a court in the United States,” said Siripan Kobkaew, one of three judges who read parts of the decision on Friday.
Mr. Bout has delivered weapons into Africa and Afghanistan, among other places, but has also flown missions for the Pentagon in Iraq and for the United Nations. Sometimes he was hired to fly arms to a particular group, the authors of “Merchant of Death” note, and then was paid by the United Nations to deliver humanitarian aid to the same area.
Mr. Bout was arrested in March 2008 at a hotel in Bangkok after agreeing to sell millions of dollars’ worth of arms to undercover agents for the United States Drug Enforcement Administration posing as rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
The case has offered a window into the scale of arms trafficking. During the meeting in 2008, Mr. Bout told the undercover agents that he could deliver 700 to 800 surface-to-air missiles, 5,000 AK-47 assault weapons, millions of rounds of ammunition, land mines, C-4 explosives and remotely piloted aircraft, according to the United States indictment.
Michael Schwirtz contributed reporting from Moscow, and Scott Shane from Washington.
A version of this article appeared in print on August 21, 2010, on page
