 |
|
Victor Bout stalkers in chief: Washington Post reporter and author of Blood from Stones, Douglas Farah, who blogs here, and Alexander Harrowell, in the UK, who blogs here. Harrowell writes me today that Richard Chichakli, who serves as the 'CFO' of the airline company Bout uses to fly munitions for the Americans into Iraq, Jet Line, (as well as for his blood diamonds trafficking), has been writing to him on his blog. Harrowell writes me:
Congrats on getting the Bout story operational again. Interestingly enough,
since the last mention of him on your and D. Farah's blogs, Richard Chichakli has been reading my blog. You may recall I had a commenter claiming to be him in May, but for various reason I believed him to be phoney. This time, though, an IP address that came up in the referrer log came up with this "who is" result:IP: 65.65.122.176
CustName: Chichakli,
Hickman-Riggs & Riggs
Address: P. R. City: Richardson
StateProv: TX
PostalCode: 75080
Country: US
RegDate: 2001-02-22...Chichakli, Hickman-Riggs and Riggs is his accountancy firm. The street address checks out, as does another address in the whois files (his home address). I note that he seems to be an egosurfer - the hit arrived from a Google search for "richard chichakli". As far as Jetline goes, I assume we're talking about a firm called Jetline International, registered in Equatorial Guinea with operating bases in Tripoli and (here goes) Ras al-Khaimah in (guess where) the UAE. It was established in 2000 ostensibly to provide "VIP flights to the Community of Sahel-Sahara governments," but strangely most of its aircraft are large long-haul types (Ilyushin 62, Ilyushin 76, DC-8). Some of the Il-62s move about registry oddly. One of them, serial no. 4648414, registration either EL-ALM, 5A-DKT or 3C-QQR, has apparently gone from well-known Boutco Air Bas to Jetline and back whilst being reregistered 3 times in 3 different national registries - nice!
He's got the airplane registry numbers for goodness sake. Bout is working for the American military in plain sight. People should be jumping all over this.
[thx to BH and MW for the links]
Here's a photo of Richard Chichakli, born in Syria in 1959, member of the US Army from 1990-1993, financial overseer of Victor Bout's air cargo operations.
