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Wife laid trail to Saddam
SADDAM Hussein was captured in a filthy underground hole because of the demands of the one woman he still trusted. She is Samira Shahbander, the second of his four wives. And now she may receive part of, if not all, of the $US25 million bounty the US Government promised for information that led to the capture of the Iraqi dictator. Israeli intelligence agency Mossad had been tailing her since she fled to Beirut, Lebanon, before the US invasion. In a tapped phone call last Thursday she arranged to meet the former dictator that weekend after demanding cash. But the meeting was cancelled at the last minute - perhaps because Saddam was beginning to feel the heat that US forces were closing in.

Late last Friday, US soldiers captured an Iraqi fugitive they had been hunting since July - who is believed to have given them the former dictator’s exact location - a farm at Ad Dawr, about 15km from Tikrit, his ancestral home and where he was caught late Saturday.

Last March, with the coalition forces closing in, Saddam arranged for Samira and their son Ali to flee to Lebanon. With her she took $US5 million in cash and a trunk of gold bars from the vaults of the Central Bank of Iraq. She told friends she was going first to France and then to Moscow - that Saddam had been secretly promised by Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, to give her sanctuary.
Instead, she went to a pre-arranged hideout - a villa - in the Beirut suburbs. It was there that the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad discovered her. Mier Dagan, the head of Mossad, sent a team of surveillance specialists from the service yaholomin to bug Samira’s every move. The Israeli team noted that Samira - who may have also been colluding with US intelligence agencies without Mossad’s knowledge - had transferred most of her money out of Lebanon to a Credit Suisse bank account in Geneva. A month ago, Samira cashed in her gold bars for US dollars with a Beirut money dealer. Then she started to call Saddam. Supported by Israeli Air Force surveillance aircraft, the yaholomin tracked the calls close to the Syrian border...
The actual story doesn't really jibe with the headline. Apparently Sammy stayed in some sort of contact with Samira. But he was actually sold out by the guy captured Friday. I think news.com.au just wanted to post a picture of her — she's a bleached blondie who looks like she should be named Trixie — and built the story around it, based on what could have been.

Posted by: OMER ISHMAIL 2003-12-17
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=22871