MOSCOW. June 8 (Interfax) - Russian businessman Viktor Bout, convicted in the United States for arms trafficking, will serve his 25-year term in a special unit of the Marion high-security prison in Illinois, the daily Kommersant writes on Friday.
"The defense attorney's claims that the prison regime could be softened for Bout, may have been premature. Marion is one of the two American prisons where part of the inmates are kept in the so-called communication management units (CMU)," the newspaper writes.
These units were set up in April 2006 and, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, are intended to control information which the inmates, convicted on terrorism charges, get and release, it said.
"Whereas ordinary inmates have the right to one visit per week, and 300 minutes of telephone calls as a minimum per month, the inmates of the CMU unit are allowed only one telephone call a week lasting no more than 15 minutes," the newspaper writes.
Visits - two per month - can last two hours each. Personal contact is ruled out. The inmate and his guest meet in a room divided by a glass wall and talk by telephone in the English language only, the Kommersant writes.
"The correspondence will be read by the prison staff, and the letters copied with the exception of the correspondence intended for defense lawyers," it says.
Seventy-one inmates are currently held in CMUs in Illinois and Indiana, among them people convicted for financing terrorist organizations, members of Islamic groups, including al-Qaeda and Somalia's Al-Shabaab, organizers of the terror attacks at the New York international trade center in 1993, and the leaders of several organized criminal groups and radical groupings," the daily writes.