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Son of Suriname’s President guilty of cocaine, terrorist related charges
GUILTY: Dino Bouterse
PARAMARIBO, Suriname: Dino Bouterse (41), son of the President Desi Bouterse of Suriname, pleaded guilty to charges of attempting to smuggle cocaine to the U.S., aid Hezbollah, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, international media reports indicate.
“In 2013, I knowingly provided a false Surinamese passport to a person I believed to be associated with Hezbollah, an organization I knew to be designated a terrorist organization by the United States,” Bouterse, said at a court hearing Friday in New York, according to a Reuters report.
The defendant also pleaded guilty to conspiring to import narcotics and carrying a firearm during a drug-trafficking crime. Bouterse faces a sentence of between 15 years and life in prison and he is being accused of attempting to assist individuals he believed to be Hezbollah representatives, to establish a base in Suriname to attack Americans.
He has negotiated a paycheck of initially US$2M, court documents show. The defendant was arrested a year earlier in Panama and subsequently extradited to the United States on charges that he conspired to smuggle cocaine to the U.S. Edmund Muntslag, a co-defendant, was arrested in Trinidad and Tobago at the same time and is currently fighting a court battle there to prevent his extradition to the U.S.
Instead of the anti-tank launcher named in the indictment, as part of a plea deal, Bouterse admits that he was brandishing a handgun when he showed, who later appeared to be undercover agents a quantity of cocaine in his office in Paramaribo.
At the hearing in a Manhattan court. Bouterse was dressed in blue prison garb, sometimes using a Dutch interpreter in his exchanges with Judge Shira Scheindlin. The judge warned that if a terrorism enhancement applies to his case, his minimum sentence could double from 15 years to 30 years behind bars. Sentencing is scheduled for January 2015.
The undercover operation to trap the defendant took about nine months. Documents indicate that Bouterse was approached by two confidential informants of the Drug Enforcement Administration, who claimed to have ties with the Mexican drug organization who were looking to put up shop in Suriname. According to the indictment, Bouterse promised that he could help with the cocaine trafficking operation and that he also could provide firearms. A test run of 10 kilos cocaine he tried to export from Suriname to the US were seized in Trinidad and Tobago.
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