The man who strolled off the redeye flight from Moscow into Bangkok airport on Thursday morning looked like just another one of the thousands of Russian tourists who flock to the Thai capital in the winter months.

But this was no ordinary tourist bound for the city’s honky-tonk bars. Viktor Bout, the world’s most infamous gunrunner, nicknamed the “merchant of death” for his role in the diamond wars and other conflicts that were tearing Africa apart, had arrived in Bangkok to seal his latest deal.

Hunted for years by western law-enforcement agencies, Bout was flushed out of hiding at the prospect of a multi-million-dollar sale to South American guerrillas. Bout, always scrupulous about guarding his freedom, was confident that Thailand was a safe rendezvous point.

He did not suspect that the Colombian terrorists he was expecting to meet to finalise the shipment of arms were undercover agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) who had lured him away from the safe territory of Moscow into a sting operation.

Clad like a Russian holiday-maker in a sloppy T-shirt worn outside his casual trousers, the unsuspecting 41-year-old Bout did not realise he was under surveillance from the moment he landed. He took a limousine from the airport through the Bangkok traffic and checked in at the Sofitel. There, he awaited two men he knew as representatives of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc).

But instead of putting the final seal on a deal to deliver 100 surface-to-air missiles, attack helicopters and other weaponry to assist the Farc in its 40-year insurgency against the Colombian government, Bout was ambushed by two dozen American and Thai agents who poured into the hotel and arrested him.

Bout gave in without a struggle. “The game is over,” he said as he was handcuffed and led away. His alleged co-conspira-tor, Andrew Smulian, escaped and was still at large yesterday.

The arrest was the culmination of months of dangerous and painstaking undercover preparation to bring Bout to justice and, according to western diplomatic sources, a tribute to the extraordinary new breed of cross-border cooperation by law-enforce-ment agencies that is a feature of the post 9/11 world.

As well as DEA agents and Thai police, the operation to capture Bout involved the cooperation of police and intelligence officials from Romania, the Dutch Antilles and Denmark. Two members of Bout’s operation were also recruited by the DEA to betray him.

Smulian is said to have told the informants that the weapons were in Bulgaria. Bout said he could arrange for them to be dropped into Colombian territory using combat parachutes.

Bout’s rise to notoriety as the the head of a global arms smuggling network dates from the end of the cold war in the early 1990s. Educated at the Military Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow, a breeding ground for Soviet intelligence agents, Bout was a 25-year-old military officer at the time of the Soviet Union’s break-up. He saw the collapse presented him with a unique money-making opportunity.

Suddenly, scores of worn-out Soviet military aircraft no longer able to fly for lack of maintenance or fuel and huge stores of surplus weapons had become available. Bout’s twisted genius was to make them airworthy and, with a nudge and a wink from Russian officials, fill them with the weapons to supply booming demand from traditional Soviet clients and armed groups in Africa.

At the height of Bout’s notoriety, he was supplying arms to the Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, rebels in Angola and the Taliban in Afghanistan. He operated the world’s largest private fleet of heavy-lift Antonov cargo planes. The weapons to Taylor ended up in the hands of Sierra Leone’s child soldiers who became notorious for murder, rape and hacking off limbs.

When Belgium closed down his base at Ostend airport and circulated an arrest warrant for gunrunning and money-laundering, Bout moved his fleet to Sharjah in the Gulf. He sheltered his clandestine gunrunning missions behind a network of legitimate operations. In 2000 he flew United Nations peacekeepers to East Timor at the same time as the UN was accusing him of sanc-tions-busting in Africa.

The Iraq war brought Bout another rush of business. It did not matter to him who paid. Nor, it seems, did Bout’s notorious track record make much difference to his customers.

Thus, as the US Treasury Department was freezing Bout’s assets under orders from President George W Bush, the Pentagon and US contractors were hiring him to fly supplies into Iraq.

Douglas Farah, author of the Merchant of Death book on Bout, said there was no doubt Bout benefited from the US government’s “schizophrenic policies”. He said that after it emerged Bout was still on the US payroll despite a presidential order, the Pentagon “decided they were going to ignore it and pretend it didn’t happen”.

Finally, it seems that Bout will face justice, though it is not clear where. Extradition to America could be politically tricky. Thailand has already indicated it might want to put the gunrunner on trial.

The Russian authorities might also seek Bout’s return. But US and European intelligence agencies have long suspected Bout enjoys protection from Russia because of his former KGB status.

If Bout is extradited to America, he faces a 15-year-jail sentence. A trial could prove embarrassing for the government. Farah expects Bout to argue that the US government always knew what he was and chose to do business with him on that basis. “That may not excuse his illicit activities, but it does show a pattern of engagement with the US, the UN and so on, and that he was always a known quantity,” he said.

Justice is rarely clear-cut, but seeing it through in Bout’s case promises to be a singularly murky enterprise. Additional reporting: Brian Johnson-Thomas

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