A US federal court sentenced a Syrian arms dealer to 30 years in prison for conspiring to sell millions of dollars worth of weapons to Colombian rebels, it was reported Wednesday, dpa reported.
Judge Jed S Rakoff said Syrian native Monzer al-Kassar, 63, and an associate agreed to sell huge quantities of weapons "to what they believed was a terrorist organization who would use those weapons, among other things, to kill Americans and to wreak havoc."
Spain's National Court approved al-Kassar's extradition to the United States last year on the condition that he would not be sentenced to death or jailed for life.
The New York Times reported that there was evidence during the trial that al-Kassar provided intelligence information to Spanish authorities and that some of it might have helped the US. But much of this was classified and not presented to the jury
The judge said it was "a tragedy that a person of his intelligence has spent so much of his life in activities that certainly were not calculated to advance the human race."
Al-Kassar's associate, Luis Felipe Moreno Godoy, a 60-year-old Chilean, was sentenced to 25 years in jail.
According to the evidence, the two men agreed to sell 15 surface- to-air missiles, 4,000 grenades, 9,000 assault rifles and thousands of pounds of explosives to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) for a profit of more than 1 million dollars, the report said.
Al-Kassar was detained in 2007 at Madrid airport, after flying in from the southern Costa del Sol, where he has lived since 1980. Spain's National Court said last year that he had supplied weapons to groups in Nicaragua, Brazil, Cyprus, Bosnia, Croatia, Somalia, Iran and Iraq.
While al-Kassar and Godoy said they were innocent, the judge said he could not ignore "the totally overwhelming nature of the proof in this case."
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