Monzer al-Kassar () (born in Hama, Syria in 1945), 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.
Early years
Al-Kassar was born in Hama and grew up in the nearby town of Nebek. His father was a lawyer and diplomat who at various times was Syria's ambassador to Canada and India.
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.
Al-Kassar attended law school in the late 1960s.
According to a 2009 report by the United States Congress, Monzer al-Kassar supplied weapons and military equipment to armed groups engaged in violent conflicts in Nicaragua, Brazil, Cyprus, Bosnia, Croatia, Somalia, Iran and Iraq. In 1970, al-Kassar had his first Interpol-recorded arrest, for theft, in Trieste, Italy.
United Kingdom
In 1972, he was arrested in Copenhagen for selling hashish. He then moved to the United Kingdom. He lived in Sloane Square in London, where he took part in an operation that imported heroin and hashish from Lebanon, then bought arms with the profits and smuggled them back to Lebanon. In either 1974 or 1977 (sources conflict), al-Kassar was arrested and jailed in the UK for selling hashish. He served less than two years in jail.
In 1981, he married Raghdaa Habbal, who was seventeen years old at the time, and who came from a well-connected Syrian family in Beirut.
In 1984, al-Kassar was expelled from the UK for drug and arms trafficking.
"The Prince of Marbella" After his expulsion from the UK, al-Kassar moved, along with his wife and by then two children, to Marbella, Spain. There he bought a mansion, that he named "Palacio de Mifadil" ("Palace of My Virtue", in a combination of Spanish and Arabic), and quickly developed a reputation as a wealthy, ostentatious businessman. The European press soon began to call him "The Prince of Marbella". In 1985 he was the subject of a profile in the French magazine Paris Match, which wrote, "in a few years, this Syrian merchant became one of the most powerful businessmen in the world."
The Spanish government alleges that in 1985, al-Kassar sold arms to the hijackers of the Achille Lauro cruise ship, and that afterwards he flew the hijackers' leader, Abu Abbas, to safety in one of his private airplanes. Al-Kassar has denied the charge. In 1995, a court in Madrid acquitted Al-Kassar of all charges related to the hijacking.
In 1987, investigations into the Iran-Contra scandal found that al-Kassar had been paid 1.5 million GBP by someone in the U.S. government to sell arms to Nicaraguan Contras; according to an article in The New Yorker, the money came from "a Swiss bank account controlled by Oliver North and his co-conspirators."
In 1992, al-Kassar made arms sales valued in the millions of USD to Croatia, Bosnia and Somalia, violating United Nations arms embargoes to all three countries. That same year, al-Kassar obtained an Argentine passport, with the alleged plan to move there, with the assistance of then-president Carlos Menem, whose parents were from the same town in Syria as those of al-Kassar, and who may have been a relative. (In 2000, he was indicted in Argentina for "obtaining documents under false pretences".) Also in 1992, the Spanish government arrested him for his alleged earlier involvement in the Achille Lauro hijacking, along with "falsification of documents" and "possession of illegal weapons and vehicles". He spent more than a year in jail before being released on bail. The trial came in 1995, and he was found not guilty on all charges.
In July 2006, the government of Iraq placed him at No. 26 on their "most wanted" list, calling him "one of the main sources of financial and logistics support" for the Iraqi insurgency.