Russian Not an Arms Dealer, Caller Says

By ROBYN DIXON

Feb. 28, 2002 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

MOSCOW — A man who identified himself as the brother of a Russian businessman accused of transporting arms for Al Qaeda terrorists said Wednesday that his sibling was a common air carrier, not an arms dealer, who had no idea what his cargo was.

Sergei Bout, 41, angrily dismissed allegations against his 35-year-old brother, Victor. In a phone interview with The Times, he did not divulge his brother’s whereabouts, but said he is “now living quite legally, residing in one country.”

“No one is investigating him, and no one is sending any queries to any agencies about him,” Sergei Bout said. He described as nonsense allegations that his brother was involved in shipping weapons from the United Arab Emirates to the Taliban.

Bout phoned the Los Angeles Times’ Moscow Bureau, and it was not possible to verify his identity. However, the call came after several efforts to contact him through intermediaries.

Belgian authorities last week issued an arrest warrant for Victor Bout on suspicion of money laundering. He also has been cited in U.N. reports for alleged arms trafficking in Africa, and Belgian authorities are examining claims he is involved in diamond smuggling.

In recent years, the United Nations and the State Department said, Victor Bout has moved his network of 60 cargo planes and 300 pilots and employees from Belgium to South Africa and to his most recent base in the United Arab Emirates.

But Sergei Bout compared his brother to a taxi driver who had no idea of his clients’ cargo.

“Imagine a taxi driver who is supposed to give a lift to a customer . . . but suddenly this taxi driver asks the customer, ‘What have you got in your suitcase?’ ” Sergei Bout said in the interview.

He said that in such an instance, the contents of the cargo is none of the carrier’s business: “I am a taxi driver; I am a carrier. I don’t know what I carry. Maybe I carry a nuclear bomb. No one is telling me about it,” he said.

“He [Victor] is just an ordinary carrier. There are thousands of them in the world,” Sergei Bout said.

Sergei Bout said reports by The Times and other media about his brother were “total nonsense.”

A four-year Belgian police investigation into Victor Bout’s finances peaked this year just as the U.S. and other Western governments were looking into new allegations that his air cargo network aided Al Qaeda terrorists and Taliban militants in Afghanistan.

Belgian and other officials involved in the search for Bout have yet to determine where he is.

Echoing a claim frequently made in Russia, Sergei Bout said Wednesday that he believed the allegations against his brother were part of a Western plot. He charged that the aim of it was to undermine successful Russian transport firms competing against Western companies.

He also attacked the credibility of U.N. reports on his brother, which he said could mean millions of dollars in lost business.

An October 2001 U.N. Security Council report on fighting in Angola said Sergei Bout held an interest in a firm that acted as a subcontractor for his brother.

A member of a U.N. panel directed by the Security Council to investigate Victor Bout’s operation in the Emirate of Sharjah and its role in transporting arms to Liberia has identified Sergei Bout as the operator of Air Cess, a transportation company originally owned by his brother.

Johan Peleman, a Belgian arms-trafficking expert who served on the Liberia panel, said Sergei Bout told U.N. investigators in the UAE that “he was no longer in business with his brother, although there may be occasional contractual agreements between his companies and those of Victor.”

Peleman said Sergei Bout also told the U.N. team, “Victor is not really involved with aviation anymore.”

Sergei Bout told The Times on Wednesday that he had been in a different line of business from his brother but that he was taking a break from it. He did not say what that business was.

Times staff writers Judy Pasternak and Stephen Braun in New York and Sergei L. Loiko of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.