Renowned arms dealer Viktor Bout, a Russian whose supplying of rebel groups and feeding of international conflicts earned him the moniker "Merchant of Death," was arrested in Bangkok on March 6, 2008, in a joint U.S.-Thai sting operation. Bout, 41, is accused of supplying arms for everyone from to the Taliban and al-Qaida to fighters in Rwanda and Sierra Leone.
Said to have inspired Nicolas Cage's character in "Lord of War," the suspected arms trafficker was seized when U.S.


agents, posing as FARC rebels seeking millions in weapons, met Bout at a hotel.

More from the New York Times:

• "Federal prosecutors in New York said they would seek the extradition of Mr. Bout (pronounced boot) and an associate, Andrew Smulian, who was also detained in Bangkok on Thursday, to stand trial in the United States on a charge of conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization. Although American officials said Thailand appeared to be eager to be rid of Mr. Bout, it was not known when he would be brought to the United States.
  ...A criminal complaint unsealed in Manhattan said the plans for a meeting with Mr. Bout in Thailand had taken shape after earlier meetings, most of them conducted by Mr. Smulian, with informants posing as FARC members in the Netherlands Antilles, Denmark and Romania.
  
  The conversations were secretly recorded by drug enforcement agents. The actual size of the deal was not made clear from the documents released by the government, but the complaint indicated that Mr. Bout planned to charge a $5 million delivery fee to transport the surface-to-air missiles and armor-piercing rocket launchers to South America.
  
  American officials have publicly identified Mr. Bout as a rogue weapons smuggler who profited mainly from arms dealing that fueled bloody conflicts in Africa. He was said to have built a shadowy network of air cargo companies in the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe and the United States.
  
  Mr. Bout was born in what is now Tajikistan and educated at the Military Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow. He is said to have begun in the arms trade after his air force unit was disbanded with the breakup of the Soviet Union."
  

For his part, Bout denies ever meeting with the Taliban or al-Qaida. And Bout's brother, Sergei, denounced the arrest the following day, offering a softer explanation for Bout's activities:

"In all probability he's a normal businessman. Whatever weapons he may have traded he traded as a transporter, like any one of us could be a taxi driver. Can a taxi driver be described as an accessory just because a passenger in his car has a gun in his briefcase?"