Monzeral-Kassar also known as the «Prince of Marbella», is an international arms dealer. He has been connected to numerous crimes, including the Achille Lauro hijacking and the Iran-Contra scandal. On November 20, 2008, he was convicted in U.S. federal court as part of a U.S. government sting, for agreeing to sell arms to undercover agents posing as suppliers for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a Colombian guerrilla organization. He was sentenced to thirty years' imprisonment [2].
Palacio de Mifadil, one of several homes owned by the wealthy Syrian arms merchant Monzer al-Kassar, is a white marble mansion overlooking the resort town of Marbella, on the southern coast of Spain. Surrounded by lush grounds and patrolled by three mastiffs, it has a twelve-car garage and a swimming pool shaped like a four-leaf clover. One sunny morning in 2007, two Guatemalans, named Carlos and Luis, arrived at the front gate. One of Kassar’s associates ushered the men between curving marble staircases into the grand salon. Kassar was expecting them. He had agreed to sell them several million dollars’ worth of weapons for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—the South American narco-insurgent organization known as the FARC, which the U.S. State Department considers a terrorist group [1].
Since moving to Spain, some thirty years earlier, Kassar had become one of the world’s most prolific arms dealers. Although he owned an import-export company that conducted legitimate business, he had also developed a reputation as a trafficker willing to funnel munitions to rogue states and armed groups in defiance of international sanctions and embargoes. He has been accused of many transgressions: fuelling conflicts in the Balkans and Somalia, procuring components of Chinese anti-ship cruise missiles for Iran, supplying the Iraqi Army on the eve of the U.S. invasion in 2003, and using a private jet to spirit a billion dollars out of Iraq and into Lebanon for Saddam Hussein [2]. A 2003 United Nations report branded him an «international embargo buster.» In 2006, when Iraq’s new government released its list of most-wanted criminals, Kassar was No. 26. (He was «one of the main sources of financial and logistics support» for the insurgency, an Iraqi official said.) Authorities claimed that Kassar had been involved in smuggling drugs, financing terrorist groups, and ordering the assassination of various rivals and witnesses against him. Expelled from England, and convicted in absentia on terrorism charges in France, for supplying explosives that were used in a 1982 attack on a restaurant in the Jewish Quarter in Paris, he had been a wanted man for thirty years.
Kassar lived in Marbella with his wife, Raghdaa, and their four children. Ostentatiously well mannered and stylishly dressed, he projected a roguish cosmopolitanism: he spoke half a dozen languages, had half a dozen passports, and maintained a fleet of Mercedes sedans, along with a private jet that he piloted himself. If his house guests were smokers, he offered them specially rolled Cuban cigars with a band that read «M. al-Kassar» and bore a tiny photo of his son. He often visited the casino in nearby Puerto Banús to play blackjack, always paying for his chips with the same dog-eared check, which was returned to him once he had collected his winnings [1]. He showed it off to friends, as an indication of his skill as a gambler.
The palace in Marbella is empty now. The property is big and difficult to maintain, Haiffa explained, and it was too painful to remain there. The Kassar family has moved to a nearby villa. Haiffa’s mother, Raghdaa, has been denied entry to the United States, so she could not attend the trial or visit Kassar in South Carolina, where he is serving his sentence at a medium-security federal prison. Kassar is healthy, friends say, and is appealing his conviction. He talks to his Mexican cellmate in Spanish, and has a job cleaning windows. He has been cooking for other inmates. Recently, he began teaching them languages as well.«I still believe in justice, and I will never stop legally fighting till the last breath,» Kassar wrote recently. «No one can hide from the truth forever» [3].
In the years between the AchilleLauro trial and the beginning of Operation Legacy, Jim Soiles kept an old safe in his coat closet at home, stuffed with files about Monzer al-Kassar. From time to time, he would open the safe, flip through the files, and think that perhaps it was time to shred them. But something always stopped him [2].
After the September 11 attacks in 2001, there was renewed interest in the United States in apprehending those connected to terrorism, as well as new laws that gave greater power for «extraterritorial jurisdiction», or the ability of the U.S. government to investigate and arrest people suspected of committing crimes outside the United States. In 2006, the Drug Enforcement Administration decided to put together a sting to trap al-Kassar, code-named «Operation Legacy» and led by Jim Soiles and the DEA's Special Operations Division. They enlisted a 69-year-old Palestinian former member of the Black September Organization, referred to publicly only as «Samir», who was then being held in a U.S. prison. Samir spent much of 2006 trying to arrange a meeting with al-Kassar, and was finally able to in December 2006 [1].
The informants, at the request of the DEA, then tried to lure al-Kassar to Romania, ostensibly in order to collect his payment for the sale, where he could be easily arrested by U.S. agents; but al-Kassar refused. They instead convinced him to board a flight to Madrid for the same purpose. In June 2007, the Cuerpo Nacional de Policía (Spanish National Police) at the Barajas Airport in Madrid arrested him after he got off the plane. He was charged with conspiring to kill Americans, supplying terrorists, obtaining anti-aircraft missiles and money laundering [3].
On June 13, 2008, al-Kassar was extradited to the United States for trial; he arrived in New York in shackles the following day. On November 20, 2008, he was convicted in federal court of five charges, among them money laundering and conspiring to sell arms to suppliers for FARC. Sentencing for al-Kassar and co-defendant Luis Felipe Moreno Godoy was scheduled for February 18, 2009. The relatives of Leon Klinghoffer, the man murdered in the AchilleLauro incident, were in court for the verdict. Al-Kassar was represented by Ira Sorkin.
A New Yorker article about the sting speculated that al-Kassar had been unusually lax in his behavior with the fake arms buyers, and that this may have been caused by financial desperation on al-Kassar's part, since, due to a decrease in world conflicts, the international arms trade was slower than it had been during the late 20th century.
СПИСОК ЛИТЕРАТУРЫ
1. Arms dealer jailed for 30 years [Электронный ресурс] – Режим доступа: https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7909411.stm – Дата доступа: 25.02.2009.
2. The Trafficker [Электронный ресурс] – Режим доступа: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/02/08/the-trafficker – Дата доступа: 08.02.2010.
3. An Arms Dealer Is Sentenced to 30 Years in a Scheme to Sell Weapons to Terrorists [Электронныйресурс] – Режимдоступа: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/us/25arms.html?_r=0 – Датадоступа: 24.02.2009.
Данная статья посвящена известному международному торговцу оружием родом из Сирии Монзеру Аль-Кассар. Лидер международной преступной организации известен также как «Принц Марбельи». Поставлял оружие международным террористическим организациям, таким как ФАРК. В 2008 г. был осужден федеральным судом США к 30 годам тюремного заключения.