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Monzer al-Kassar (in Arabic منذر الكسار) (born in al-Nabk, Syria in 1945),〔(Meet the 'Prince of Marbella' - is he really supporting Iraq's insurgency? ), Aram Roston, ''The Observer'', October 1, 2006〕 also known as the "Prince of Marbella", is an international arms dealer. He has been connected to numerous crimes, including the ''Achille Lauro'' hijacking and the Iran-Contra scandal. On November 20, 2008, he was convicted in U.S. federal court as part of a U.S. government sting, for agreeing to sell arms to undercover agents posing as suppliers for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a Colombian guerrilla organization. He was sentenced to thirty years' imprisonment.〔Al Jazeera, (US jails Syrian-born Arms Dealer ), February 25, 2009〕 ==Early years== His father, Mohamed al-Kassar, was a supporter of president Hafez al-Assad, and was appointed Syrian ambassador first to India and later to Canada. Monzer al-Kassar had links to the highest echelons of the Syrian government. According to U.S. authorities, Monzer's mentor in the drug and arms trade was his older brother, Ghassan, who had begun selling drugs in the late 1960s. (Ghassan remained in the arms business until his death of natural causes in 2009).〔("The Trafficker -- The Decades-Long Battle to Catch an International Arms Broker ), Patrick Radden Keefe, ''The New Yorker'', February 8, 2010〕 Al-Kassar attended law school in the late 1960s.〔 In 1970, al-Kassar had his first Interpol-recorded arrest, for theft, in Trieste, Italy.〔 Al-Kassar became an arms dealer in the "early 1970s", according to him, when the government of Yemen asked him to buy rifles and pistols from Poland for them (it is alleged that those arms were then sent to various terror groups). In the 1980s he was Commercial Attaché of People's Democratic Republic of Yemen in People's Republic of Poland.〔(W sieci terroru. Tygodnik Nasza Polska, nr 42 (663) )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Monzer al-Kassar」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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