Alain Lallemand, Belgium, is a senior investigative reporter for Le Soir, the leading French-language Brussels daily.

He has written extensively on organized crime, drug trafficking and guerrillas as well as more than half a dozen books on the Russian mafia in Europe, the boom of synthetic drugs, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

His 1996 book on the Russian mafia was one of the earliest in-depth investigations into the activities of this new transnational criminal threat.

Lallemand is also a lecturer in narrative and investigative writing at the University of Louvain.