On human wrongs: Yair Klein and the European Court of Human Rights http://colombiareports.com/opinion/gustavo-silva-cano/9097-on-human-wrongs-yair-klein-and-the-european-court-of-human-rights.html

Klein’s business interests led him to Colombia in the mid 1980s, when the country’s bloody war between the state and drug traffickers was starting to escalate. At that time he made contacts with people like Pablo Escobar and Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, the leaders of the Medellin Cartel. Klein provided them with weapons. A couple of weeks ago I was reading a book called 'Cocaine Politics' by Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, and I found Klein’s name mentioned in pages 76 and 77: “Klein became the center of another scandal involving a large shipment of Israeli arms to the Medellin cartel […] The weapons traveled via the Caribbean island of Antigua.”

In 1989, when Escobar’s thugs blew up an Avianca airliner in midflight killing over 110 people, the Colombian authorities also saw Klein’s hand behind the terrorist attack. According to 'Cocaine Politics', at the time, “Colombia’s top drug investigator, Gen. Miguel Maza Marquez, blamed Yair Klein […] : “He is the person who trained these people (the Medellin cartel) in the making of bombings and is responsible for this aggression.”

Besides acting as weapons supplier and bomb maker in chief, Klein also trained dozens of the cartels’ paid assassins. He taught them how to shoot with accuracy, how to attack a moving vehicle, how to kill their target in seconds. Klein was instrumental in the creation of the first paramilitary groups that would later merge into the massive Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), the far-right terrorist group that had FARC as its sworn enemy, and that wanted to “refound the homeland” by putting political allies in strategic positions in government. Fidel Castaño, a top paramilitary leader, was one of Klein’s apprentices.