One of the world’s biggest traffickers of heroin may have been responsible for securing the Winter Olympic Games for Russia.
Gafur Rakhimov is reportedly a “key member of a Russian-Asian crime network called the Brothers’ Circle,” and the U.S. government tried to freeze his bank accounts all over the world because he operated “major international drug syndicates involving the trafficking of heroin.”
Rakhimov has reportedly admitted that he secured the votes of Central Asian countries to help Russia get the Sochi Games. And after Russia secured the games in 2007, the head of the Russian bid even publicly thanked him for securing those votes, “without which…it would have been hard for Sochi to count on the victory.”
According to the Daily Mail, “Rakhimov is a leading member of an organized crime syndicate that specializes in exporting heroin from central Asia to Europe, including the UK,” and he was “banned from attending the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney but he still serves as a vice president of the Olympic Council of Asia, a group of countries that are members of the IOC.”
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