Hundreds of kilos of cocaine were set to arrive at a Syrian port hidden in a shipping container supposedly full of fruit. In exchange, weapons from the arsenal of Syria’s deposed dictator would arm one of the most notorious criminal organizations in Latin America. And millions of dollars would be laundered along the way.
This plot was made public last week in an unsealed grand jury indictment in federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia, where one of its key players made a first appearance. The charging document sketches the outlines of an alleged scheme that sheds light on a complex criminal network of drug cartels, rebel groups and rogue regimes spanning four continents.
Antoine Kassis, a Lebanese national named in the indictment and one of three men charged in connection with the plan, appeared in court on Friday after being extradited from Kenya. Prosecutors accused the men of involvement in a narco-terrorism conspiracy and of conspiring to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization, Colombia’s National Liberation Army.
The case is notable for the sinister international ties it seems to expose and because it appears to justify widespread concerns in the international community that the military arsenal of Bashar al-Assad, the longtime Syrian dictator who was deposed in December, could fall into criminal hands.
According to the indictment, first noted in the newsletter Court Watch, Mr. Kassis was a drug trafficker in Lebanon with high-level ties to members of the Assad regime, which was known for turning Syria into a narcostate.
The indictment links Mr. Kassis to a global money laundering network headquartered in Lebanon whose members were said to be working with the National Liberation Army, known as the E.L.N. for its initials in Spanish, and to have worked for the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico.
Last spring, prosecutors said, Mr. Kassis and the alleged money launderers — Alirio Rafael Quintero and Wisam Nagib Kherfan — struck a deal that relied on his Syrian ties to secure military-grade weapons for the E.L.N. to be paid for with cocaine, which the militant group cultivates and traffics. He would distribute the drugs in the Middle East and Mr. Quintero and Mr. Kherfan would handle payments and launder the proceeds, according to the indictment.
The charges arise from events and transactions that prosecutors say occurred in Colombia, Ghana, Morocco, Lebanon, Syria, Kenya, the United States and beyond, from last April until late February. Even after Mr. al-Assad was toppled in December, Mr. Kassis still had “access to weapons previously provided to the Assad regime by foreign governments, including Russia and Iran,” prosecutors said.
Mr. Kassis is accused of traveling from Lebanon to Kenya to meet an E.L.N. weapons inspector, signing a contract to import a shipping container ostensibly full of fruit from Colombia to the Port of Latakia in Syria. But “the container would actually contain 500 kilograms of cocaine,” prosecutors said.
The indictment, which was filed in March and based on evidence presented to a grand jury, does not specify when the meeting occurred and leaves unclear at this stage how exactly the scheme was detected and disrupted. But a history of court filings shows that arrest warrants were issued in early February.
Kenyan detectives detained Mr. Kassis at his hotel in Kenya earlier this year, based on a notice from Interpol sent by U.S. law enforcement authorities and a warrant from a federal court in Virginia, the Kenyan Directorate of Criminal Investigations said in a statement last week. News media in Kenya reported in early March that Mr. Kassis was wanted in the United States in connection to drug-related offenses and had been arrested by narcotics unit detectives in Kenya in late February at a hotel in Nairobi.
Mr. Kassis could not be reached for comment and no attorney for him was identified in court documents as of Wednesday. His accused co-conspirators face additional charges related to money laundering. Warrants for their arrest, issued in early February, are outstanding.
Prosecutors said that Mr. Quintero was based in Colombia and Mexico and oversaw millions of dollars in transactions among the United States, Mexico and Colombia for the Sinaloa Cartel and laundered drug proceeds believed to be from the E.L.N. He is accused of sending cryptocurrency believed to be from the E.L.N. to electronic wallets in the United States held by Mr. Kherfan, who was based in Columbia. Mr. Kherfan then converted the assets into cash for the weapons deal, prosecutors said, including payments for pilots in Ghana and Morocco who would help move the arms and the cocaine.
Formed in the 1960s, the E.L.N. is a Marxist guerrilla organization that is Latin America’s largest remaining rebel group and among its most powerful criminal groups. This year, it has been involved in violent clashes in northeastern Colombia that have displaced thousands of people and raised tensions with neighboring Venezuela, which some Colombian officials accuse of supporting the group.
In the indictment, American prosecutors say that the E.L.N. is “dedicated to the violent overthrow” of Colombia’s government, committing “kidnappings, bombings and other violent attacks targeting civilians in furtherance of its agenda.”
Ephrat Livni is a reporter for The Times’s DealBook newsletter, based in Washington.
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