It’s one of those stories that you have to stop and check yourself about. It fascinates you personally, but you think that you’re probably the only person in the newsroom to care, if not the only person in Britain, maybe.

We were in Dubai doing a completely different story (of which more later). But the papers were instead full of the story of a Chechen shot dead outside his luxury apartment block. read more

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BANGKOK, THAILAND – For an opening gambit, it didn’t suggest things would go that well. Viktor Bout had, at court, told me several times that the western media were untrustworthy and broadly despicable.

Here, as I approached the visitor’s window in the remand centre where he’s been languishing for a year, he was set apart from the Thai prisoners around him, in a yellow Hawaiian shirt, white popper buttons, and a pretty well-kempt moustache. He seemed immediately annoyed. read more

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A piece in The Observer about my prison interview with the man nicknamed the “merchant of death”:

Viktor Bout, the Russian accused of being the world’s biggest arms dealer, has angrily denied allegations that he supplied weapons to the Taliban and al-Qaida in his first interview for six years with the western media. Bout is currently languishing in a maximum security prison in Bangkok after being arrested in March last year in a sting operation by American agents. The United States has requested his extradition and final court hearings are expected to take place next week.

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