WHEN Viktor Bout, the arms dealer dubbed the “merchant of death”, settled down at home with his wife Alla to watch a Hollywood action film based on his life, he did not expect to be amused. But by the time Lord of War - starring Nicolas Cage as the law-breaking gunrunner - had come to an end, he was laughing uproariously.

“It seemed so ridiculous that Cage was playing a character supposedly modelled on Viktor that we found it very funny,” said Alla, Bout’s wife of 16 years. “What a load of rubbish. The only resemblance is that both Cage in the film and Viktor in real life speak several languages. The rest is just fantasy. Viktor is no international arms baron.”

The American authorities beg to differ. They say Bout has fuelled civil wars in Africa and supplied terrorists with arms for more than a decade. Last month Bout, 41, was arrested in a USled sting at a hotel in Bangkok in which undercover agents posed as arms buyers. He was charged with conspiring to smuggle missiles and rocket launchers to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), a rebel group listed by the US as a terrorist organisation.

Bout languishes in a Bangkok prison, even though the Thai authorities dropped charges against him last week. Police said they would seek court approval to extradite him to the United States, where he faces up to 15 years in jail.

Bout, who dismissed the charges as “fabricated American accusations”, issued a statement in prison, pleading for the Kremlin to come to his aid. In Moscow, where Bout is not a wanted man, the foreign ministry said it would intervene on his behalf, a move that is bound to strain relations with Washington.

In her first interview with a western newspaper, Alla, 44, said she had managed to speak to her husband briefly on the phone last week. It was their first conversation since his arrest.

“He sounded strong and determined,” she said. “He asked about our daughter, sought to comfort me and told me he loves me. I said I wanted to fly out to Thailand but he told me not to do so under any circumstances.”

It is alleged that at the height of Bout’s gunrunning operations he was supplying arms to the Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, Unita rebels in Angola and the Taliban in Afghanistan. He ran the world’s largest private fleet of heavy-lift Antonov cargo aircraft. The weapons he sent to Taylor ended up in the hands of Sierra Leone’s child soldiers, who became notorious for murder, rape and hacking off the limbs of their victims.

A 2005 report by Amnesty International said Bout was “the most prominent foreign businessman” selling arms to countries embargoed by the United Nations, such as Bulgaria, Slova-kia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan.

Sitting in the lobby of a Moscow hotel, Alla said her husband’s trip to Thailand had been his first outside Russia in years. He told her he was going to a spa to lose weight and would be studying Thai cookery. She was to join him later for a holiday with their 13-year-old daughter Elizaveta. According to Alla, Bout did not fear arrest because the Belgian authorities had closed a case in which he was alleged to have laundered £150m made from gunrunning.

“For years we’ve been living in Moscow,” she said. “Viktor drove a car registered in his name. He wasn’t in hiding. He’s not wanted by the Russian authorities and the Americans have never demanded his extradition or sought to question him.”

The US believes Bout has close links with Russian military intelligence and claims he has made a fortune from his illicit trade. Alla, a designer, rejected this as absurd and denied her husband was rich.

She chain-smoked as she recalled meeting Bout and falling in love with him in Mozambique in 1989. Bout was serving as an interpreter after graduating from Moscow’s military language school, a fertile recruiting ground for intelligence officers. Alla was living in Mozambique with her husband of that time, an official from the Soviet Union’s trade ministry. “We understood each other at once,” Alla recalled. “There was no need to speak. It was love at first sight. He’s a very sensitive and romantic person, an avid reader who writes his own poetry.”

After leaving her first husband she became engaged to Bout. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union he gave up his career with the military and started looking for business opportunities.

In 1993 the couple moved to Sharjah, in the Gulf, where Bout saw a chance to launch a career in the aviation industry. “In Africa he had learnt that because there were hardly any roads there was great potential in air transport. This, at the time of the Soviet collapse, when there were plenty of planes available.”

Bout’s first aviation company grew quickly. “He worked a lot in Africa, transporting all sorts of things - ostriches, UN soldiers, livestock,” she recalled. “If Viktor ever transported arms I’ve no doubt that he acted legally. We lived well, had a small villa and cars, but were never swimming in money. We never had any yachts or anything like that.”

It has been alleged that Bout hid his clandestine 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 sanctions-busting in Africa. In Iraq, US contractors hired him to fly in supplies at the time the Treasury Department was freezing his assets under orders from President George W Bush.

Bout’s wife says he closed his business in 2001, when his name was publicly linked to arms smuggling in a UN report, because he was squeezed out by local bureaucrats.

“We only rarely talked about his work but I’ve no doubt in my mind that he never did anything illegal,” said Alla. “All the stories about him are myths. All this attention to him is a farce, just like his arrest was a big spectacle orchestrated by America and the CIA. Viktor has done nothing wrong and he should be sent back to Russia.”

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