Montesinos in Court on FARC Gun-Running Charges

CALLAO NAVAL BASE, Peru (Reuters) - Former Peruvian spy chief Vladimiro Montesinos went on trial Tuesday facing the most serious charges since his arrest nearly three years ago -- smuggling guns to FARC rebels in neighboring Colombia.

The man who ran Peru from the shadows for a decade, Montesinos has been held in a top-security cell since his arrest in June 2001 pending trials on murder, drug trafficking and corruption.

Nodding to journalists before taking his seat, the 58-year-old former spymaster under ex-President Alberto Fujimori stands accused of arming Washington's enemy Colombia, the world's cocaine capital.

Prosecutors are seeking a 20-year sentence, accusing Montesinos of masterminding an operation in which 10,000 Kalashnikov rifles were procured from Jordan and parachuted to rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, in 1999.

The following year Washington launched its anti-narcotics "Plan Colombia." State attorney Ronald Gamarra has said the arms deal was worth $750,000. Montesinos says he is innocent of the gun-smuggling charges.

He sparked an unprecedented corruption scandal that felled Fujimori in 2000 and has been convicted already on four lesser corruption charges. Fujimori, wanted in Peru on murder and corruption charges, is in self-imposed exile in Japan.

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Montesinos faces gun-runner trial

Vladimiro Montesinos is accused of involvement in the smuggling of 10,000 rifles from Jordan to members of the Colombian rebel group Farc.

It is the highest profile case to date against the former army captain.

Vladimiro Montesinos is accused of planning the operation in the late 1990s.

It just preceded Washington's multi-billion dollar crackdown on illegal drugs in Colombia with the support of Peru.

Long stretch

As de facto head of Peru's security services, he is accused of arming the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia or Farc - the very people Washington was targeting.

Montesinos denies the charges, but he could receive a 20-year jail sentence if found guilty.

He is already serving nine years in a high security naval base near Lima for lesser offences and has yet to face other charges including alleged involvement in death squad killings.

The right hand man of former President Alberto Fujimori, Montesinos effectively ran Peru from the shadows throughout the 1990s.

And he sparked the corruption scandal that brought down the government in 2000, when a video appeared apparently showing him bribing an opposition politician.

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Ex-spymaster faces arms trial

FORMER spymaster Vladimiro Montesinos faces trial today for allegedly masterminding a deal that parachute-dropped 10,000 assault rifles into the hands of Colombian guerillas.

In a case that reads like a John le Carre spy thriller, men allegedly working for Montesinos posed as Peruvian military representatives to purchase Soviet-era assault rifles from Jordan that were delivered in 1999 to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

The full plot - replete with a stealth Ukrainian flight crew, a French financier and a Lebanese arms dealer known as the "Merchant of Death" - may never be revealed.

On Sunday, speculation about alleged involvement by US intelligence agents was splashed across the front page of the nation's leading newspaper.

"Vladimiro Montesinos could have had CIA support," special investigator Ronald Gamarra told El Comercio newspaper in an interview, adding: "We don't have any hard proof of this, but there are many indications that could prove this relationship."

A US Embassy spokesman would not comment on the alleged CIA links until prosecutors presented documents in court.

Montesinos, 58, used his post as de facto head of Peru's National Intelligence Service to gain control of the military, the courts, most media outlets and a majority of government agencies.

Rarely seen in public, his influence permeated a nation already weakened by chronic corruption - until former President Alberto Fujimori's decade-long regime collapsed in November 2000 amid a bribery scandal involving the spymaster.

Montesinos fled Peru but was captured in Venezuela in June 2001. Returned to Lima, he has since been locked up in a high-security naval prison he helped design for Peru's most feared guerrilla leaders.

Fujimori also fled, taking up residence in Tokyo where he remains protected from extradition to Peru by Japanese citizenship extended to him through his Japanese-born parents.

With prosecutors seeking a 20-year sentence, this trial is the most important so far against Montesinos.

In all, he faces nearly 80 charges ranging from corruption to drug trafficking and authorising murder.

Since trials began in 2002, courts have convicted him on four relatively minor corruption counts, with sentences served concurrently under Peruvian law for a total of nine years in prison.

For the most part, Montesinos has refused to testify but prosecutors hope the prospect of a stiffer sentence will compel him to talk.

The arms scandal came to light in August 2000 when Fujimori and Montesinos announced that Peruvian authorities had busted a gunrunning ring led by brothers Jose Luis and Luis Frank Aybar, both Peruvian army veterans.

But their version quickly unraveled under scepticism from Colombian and Jordanian officials.

The Aybar brothers implicate Montesinos as their boss.

Gamarra told the AP that the Aybars contacted Miami-based businessman Charles Acelor, a French-born naturalised US citizen, in 1998 in search of assault rifles.

Acelor put them in touch with international weapons broker Sarkis Soghanalian, a Turkish-born Lebanese citizen and 20-year US resident - whose long career supplying arms to ex-dictators such as Nicaragua's Anastasio Somoza and Iraq's Saddam Hussein earned him the nickname "The Merchant of Death."

Soghanalian has said he personally negotiated the deal with Montesinos.

The weapons were reportedly bought in three lots and delivered on four flights between March and August 1999 by a Ukraine-registered military surplus cargo jet. Prosecutors believe the Colombian guerrillas paid for the assault rifles with money raised by selling cocaine to a Brazilian drug trafficker.

The original plan had apparently been to sell another 40,000 rifles to the rebels but Jordan cancelled the deal when the CIA tipped it off in mid-1999 that the rifles were turning up in the hands of captured Colombian guerrillas, Gamarra said.

Arms dealers Soghanalian and Acelor maintain that they were merely middlemen who conducted a legal transaction - a claim prosecutors reject.

Acelor, arrested on an international warrant in Germany and extradited to Peru in late 2002, is expected to testify. Soghanalian was in the United States, Gamarra said. The special investigator said he believed Soghanalian had cut a deal with US authorities to avoid extradition.

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