government of Afghanistan, which later became the Northern Alliance, and knew one of its commanders, Ahmad Shah Massoud. The Central Intelligence Agency described Bout-owned planes as transporters of small arms and ammunition into Afghanistan. In 1995, Bout was involved in negotiations to free Russian hostages during the 1995 Airstan incident. In 2000, a United Nations report stated, "Bulgarian arms manufacturing companies had exported large quantities of different types of weapons between 1996 and 1998 on the basis of (forged) end-user certificates from Togo", and that "with only one exception, the company Air Cess, owned by Victor Bout, was the main transporter of these weapons from Burgas airport in Bulgaria". This was the first time Bout was formally mentioned in connection with arms trafficking. The weapons may have been destined for use in the Angolan Civil War by UNITA, the opposing faction of the MPLA which Bout had aided during his military service. Another suspected arms dealer, Imad Kebir, is said to have employed Bout's aircraft during the mid-1990s to transport weapons to Africa from Eastern European states. The cargo supposedly had end-user certificates from Zaire, but the true end-user was UNITA in neighboring Angola. From 1993, UNITA was covered under Resolution 864, a United Nations Security Council embargo prohibiting the importation of arms to Angola. In Liberia, Bout was suspected of supplying Charles Taylor with arms for use in the First Liberian Civil War, with eyewitnesses claiming that the two met personally. In 1993, Bout began collaborating with Richard Chichakli. In 1995 the Sharjah International Airport in the United Arab Emirates hired Chichakli to be the commercial manager of its new free-trade zone. Bout began using the UAE's free trade zone, and Chichakli was, at one time, called Bout's "financial manager" by the United States. Supposedly, Bout had been involved with arms dealings during the Yugoslav Wars, especially with the Bosnian government forces during its uprising against the Milošević government in Yugoslavia. Hasan Čengić, who was the former Deputy Prime Minister and Defense Minister of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina is allegedly one of his former contacts. They came into contact with each other as they both stayed in Tehran during the 1980s and 1990s. The Slobodna Bosna newspaper claims that Čengić was a business partner of Bout since then, when 200,000 AK-47 rifles went missing in transit from Bosnia to Iraq in May 2006. One of Bout's airlines