NEW YORK, May 2 (Itar-Tass) - The U.S. Attorney General’s Office insists that the court should turn down an appeal against the guilty verdict to Russian citizen Viktor Bout, who serves a 25-year term in prison Marion, Illinois, over a conspiracy for weapons smuggling, the prosecutors said in reply to an appeal from Bout’s lawyer Albert Dayan that was submitted in the New York Court of Appeals on Wednesday.
The Attorney General’s Office noted that the investigation of the Bout criminal case, despite Dayan’s affirmations, was unbiased and did not violate the legal regulations. Meanwhile, the statements of the lawyer that the U.S. authorities allegedly exerted pressure on the Thai government to influence the court ruling for Bout’s extradition in the United States are groundless.
Last January, Dayan produced a 55-page document with many arguments in favour of Bout’s innocence and unlawfulness of the actions of the U.S. law enforcement agencies and judicial authorities in the New York Federal Court of Appeals. The lawyer affirmed that a vengeful persecution of Russian citizen Viktor Bout by the U.S. government was purely political or personal, was illegal and does not have any precedence in the U.S. history.
Viktor Bout was arrested in Bangkok in March 2008 at the U.S. request and was extradited to the U.S. in November 2010. A year later 12 jurymen in the Federal Court of New York unanimously found the Russian citizen guilty of the conspiracy for weapons smuggling to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia that is considered as a terrorist organization in the U.S. In April 2012 he was sentenced to 25 years in prison.