by Collin Anderson at The Washington Free Beacon
President Joe Biden on Thursday traded Viktor Bout, the notorious international arms dealer known as the “Merchant of Death,” to Russia for U.S. basketball player Brittney Griner, who was arrested at a Moscow airport earlier this year with cannabis oil in her luggage.
But how exactly did Bout earn his nickname?
A former Soviet military translator, Bout supplied arms for deadly conflicts around the world by using his air cargo companies to smuggle weapons from Eastern Europe to Africa and the Middle East in the 1990s and early 2000s. Bout allegedly delivered surface-to-air missiles to Kenya for an attack on an Israeli airliner in 2002. And four years later, Bout reportedly met with Islamic terrorist organization Hezbollah prior to the Lebanon war. The “Merchant of Death” also had a “considerable commercial presence in Libya” during former leader Muammar Qaddafi’s reign, according to intelligence records found in the country in 2011.
U.S. officials under the Bush administration captured Bout during a 2008 sting operation in Bangkok…
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