Wanted arms dealer held in Thailand

A Russian arms dealer dubbed the "Merchant of Death" was arrested in Bangkok today.

Viktor Bout was grabbed in a luxury hotel and detained on a warrant issued by the US who accuse him of supplying weapons to Columbian drug dealers.

Bout has long been accused of breaking UN embargoes by selling arms to conflicts in Africa, and is the subject of financial sanctions by the United States and a UN travel ban.

Handcuffed and wearing an orange polo shirt, the burly 41-year-old was presented briefly to reporters at Thai police headquarters. He stared blankly at the bank of television cameras and did not make any comment.

Although Bout has been investigated by police in several countries, he has never been prosecuted for arms dealing.

Bout has been accused of trafficking weapons through a series of front companies to war-racked Central and West Africa since the early 1990s.

UN reports say he set up a network of more than 50 aircraft around the world, owned by small, tightly controlled companies.

Trade experts have said illicit diamond trading was likely one source of funds for his smuggled arms shipments.

A 2005 report by Amnesty International alleged that Bout was "the most prominent foreign businessman" involved in trafficking arms to UN-embargoed destinations from Bulgaria, Slovakia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and other countries.

The report implicated Bout in transferring "very large quantities of arms" from Ukraine.

In October 2006, US President George Bush issued an executive order freezing the assets of Bout and several associates and warlords in Congo and barring Americans from doing business with them.

They were accused of violating international laws involving targeting of children or violating a ban on sales of military equipment to Congo.

The UN-imposed an arms embargo in 2003 on the provinces of North and South Kivu and the Ituri regions of eastern Congo, and also on groups that were not a part of that year's peace agreement for the region.

Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Moscow-based Centre for Strategies and Technologies, described Bout as a rich "adventurist, one of these guys who emerged at the start of the 1990s and started pumping weapons from the former Soviet Union into Africa".

"He is not in the same league as people who make and trade weapons," he said. "He was influential and rich, but only in these vacated markets where countries were under embargo and state intermediaries didn't dare to sell."

Bout was widely believed to be a model for the arms dealer portrayed by Nicholas Cage in the 2005 film 'Lord of War'.