A former colleague of alleged arms trafficker Viktor Bout testified against him in court on Tuesday, saying that the Russian intended to sell arms to a Colombian militant group designated by the US as a terrorist organization.

Andrew Smulian, 70, discussed his relationship with Bout and how they collaborated to sell arms.  Smulian pleaded guilty in 2008 to conspiring to sell arms to terrorist groups, a charge Bout and his lawyers deny.  He is incarcerated in New York.

Smulian was arrested with Bout in a Bangkok hotel in 2008 after both men allegedly offered to sell a trove of weapons to American agents posing as members of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) .  Bout’s lawyer says his client only ever intended to sell two cargo planes, and only mentioned weapons in order to entice the potential buyers.

Former Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzkov has been summoned for questioning about a 13 billion ruble ($444 million) loan from the Bank of Moscow, Russia’s fifth largest bank.

The bank lent the money to a real estate firm, Premier Estate, which then proceeded to buy tracts of land for a construction company owned by the mayor’s wife Yelena Baturina.  The firm paid out sums for the land higher than the average value of similar plots.

Russian Interior Ministry investigators allege that the loan money fraudulently wound up in Baturina’s personal bank account.

Neither Luzhkov nor Baturina has been charged with a crime.

The Serbian Special Court of Serbia on Monday sentenced Miloš Simović and Sretko Kalinić to thirty years in prison for the 2003 murder of then Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić. Judge Velimir Lazović confirmed a previous ruling which was delivered in absentia.

According to the verdict, Simović allegedly stalked the former Prime Minister and reported his whereabouts to the leaders of the Zemun mafia clan while Kalinić circled the Government building in his car, providing an escape in case the designated assassin, Zvezdan Jovanović, failed to kill Đinđić in the building’s courtyard.

Paraguayan police arrested a former key member of the Red Command (Comando Vermelho), Brazil’s infamous Brazilian prison gang, on Wednesday.  Alexander Mendes da Silva, nicknamed "Polegar," was arrested in the town of Pedro Juan Caballero, a reputed hub for smuggling Brazil-bound weapons and drugs. Although the Brazilian authorities have been searching for Mendes since his escape from house arrest in 2009, Paraguayan law enforcement arrested him for carrying false identification. He will be extradited to Brazil next week.

The chief European Union prosecutor investigating claims of organ trafficking in Kosovo arrived in the region on Wednesday.

American John Clint Williamson is heading a task force of prosecutors and investigators under the auspices of the European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo (EULEX) to determine if reports of organ trafficking by high level Kosovo officials are true.

The allegations that soldiers from the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) removed the organs of ethnic Serbs held in detention centers in northern Albania first surfaced in a 2010 report by European Council rapporteur Dick Marty.

Former Ukrainian Minister Yulia Tymoshenko is the center of another criminal investigation Prosecutor General Victor Pshonka announced Wednesday.  He said that Tymoshenko was questioned Tuesday about alleged misconduct while she was head of an energy corporation before her tenure as Prime Minister. Prosecutors say that the former prime minister used her position to embezzle the money from what was then the country’s largest power company.

“Yesterday, she was questioned as a defendant in the presence of her defense counsel,” Pshonka told journalists at a briefing on Wednesday.  He said the case was opened on October 12.

The SBU (the Ukrainian successor to the Soviet intelligence agency) are investigating allegations that Tymoshenko embezzled money in the 1990s while she led the United Energy Systems of Ukraine (UESU) Corporation.

Alleged ex-Soviet military officer-cum-arms dealer Viktor Bout had files and links on his computer related to the Colombian rebel group known as FARC, according to an expert witness who testified at his trial on Monday.  The prosecution says this proves that Bout intended to illegally sell vast quantities of weapons to the guerilla organization.

Computer expert Steven Marx, a witness for the prosecution, told the court that the dossier about FARC on Bout’s computer was created and accessed in the days before his arrest, which shows intent to sell his weapons to the terrorist organization.

A Romanian judge serving on the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has been accused of using his position to stop an inquiry into his wife’s assets.

Corneliu Barsan, Romania’s judge on the ECtHR, claimed immunity Friday for himself and his wife Gabriela, a judge on Romania’s Supreme Court.

Mrs. Barsan has been accused by prosecutors of accepting gifts in exchange for verdicts.  Her husband says the search on his home last weekend in which investigators confiscated his wife’s computer and some of her documents is a violation of the Vienna Convention, which grants immunity to international officials.

A Croatian court denied bail yesterday to former Prime Minister Ivo Sanader.  The court rejected a substantial offer of $2.3 million cobbled together by the ex-PM’s friends and family.  Judge Kresimir Devcić of the Zagreb County court said Sanader could not be granted bail because there was a potential that he would flee the country.

The former Prime Minister’s trial, set to start on October 28, will be the first trial for war profiteering in Croatia since the country became independent in 1991. Sanader is also the first Croatian Prime Minister to face corruption charges. He was elected to two terms in 2003 and 2007, but abruptly resigned in 2009, offering no explanation. He was arrested in Austria in December and extradited back to Croatia in July.

Serbian authorities recently arrested one of the country’s most notorious narcotics traffickers, who continued to distribute heroin even after being sentenced to more than five years in prison.

Serbian police arrested Hikmet Hajrovic on October 6 in the southern Serbia city of Novi Pazar, which sits along the primary Balkan drug route to Europe.  Police seized over 100 kilograms of heroin which had been mixed with paracetamol and caffeine.

The authorities also raided a lab they suspect Hajrovic used to make and mix drugs in Tutina, Hajrovic’s birthplace.

Twenty others suspected were also arrested all over Serbia in conjunction with the investigation.  Police said 16 of them are suspected of being part of a smuggling operation led by Dalibor Ristic, a Belgrade resident allegedly oversees the distribution of between five to seven kilograms of heroin each week.