saddam (Page 3)

The U.S. Treasury Dept. is searching for the $1 billion stolen by Saddam Hussein just before the war, and believes it’s hidden in Syria, Lebanon?or France. The U.S. military found $600 million in Saddam’s palaces and $200 million in an armored car. Iraqi employees of the Baghdad Central Bank say that members of Saddam’s family removed the cash in wheelbarrows. It was then put into tractor-trailers that left Baghdad in the direction of Syria.

Some of Saddam’s assets were transferred to Syria and Lebanon in 2002 and early 2003, according to a Treasury Dept. report. Treasury Dept. general counsel David Aufhauser says, “It also pretty well confirms that there’s an awful lot of U.S. dollars there, which is the product of illicit commerce.”
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Under threat from the U.S., Syria has recently kicked out most of the Iraqi officials who fled there. But how did they get to other countries? According to the Washington Times, the French government secretly supplied them with passports that allowed them to escape to Europe. Since these are European Union passports, Saddam’s family and henchmen?and maybe even Saddam himself?could be scattered throughout 12 different countries by now. A U.S. official says, “It made it very difficult to track these people.”
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The latest guess about the dictator with 9 lives (Saddam Hussein) is that he was wounded in the first bombing raid of the Iraq war and killed in the Baghdad restaurant bombing on April 7 because “the command and control just disappeared after the first bombing raid,” according to a U.S. intelligence official.

Meanwhile, Syria has been smuggling Saddam’s aides to Belarus (where some think Saddam may be hiding), Lebanon, North Africa and other countries. They want all former Iraqi government officials out of Syria in order to avoid a U.S. attack. Many of Saddam’s family members fled to Syria just before the war. Now Saddam’s wife Sajida and her three children have been put on planes and flown to Libya and Belarus, while other family members were taken to Lebanon.
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Saddam Hussein may have obtained safe haven in the former Russian province of Belarus. Western intelligence says several intelligence agencies in the Middle East and Europe think he and his family were on a March 29 chartered cargo plane that flew from Baghdad to Minsk. “There’s no proof that Saddam was on the plane but we have proof that a plane left on that day from Baghdad airport and arrived in Minsk,” says a senior intelligence officer. “If you can think of anybody else who could obtain permission to fly out of Baghdad in the middle of a war, then please tell me.”
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