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| Iraq |
| Saddam’s top aide got Belarus passports: U.S. |
| 2003-06-25 |
| The senior lieutenant to Saddam Hussein who was detained in Iraq last week obtained passports from Belarus for himself and others, possibly including Saddam's sons, two U.S. government officials said yesterday. The lieutenant, Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti, is suspected by U.S. officials of having obtained the passports in Syria, where, he told U.S. interrogators, he spent time, after the war, with Saddam's sons, Uday and Qusay, before being expelled by Syrian authorities. Another source confirming (maybe) that Syria booted Sammy's boys. Mahmud told the interrogators that he last saw Saddam alive in Baghdad several days after the U.S. bombing attack on April 7 that was an attempt to kill him, the officials said. Belarus, part of the former Soviet Union, is an authoritarian country with close ties to Russia and its intelligence services, including the former KGB. It has been regarded by U.S. officials in the past as a possible refuge for other fugitives. The Russian intelligence services had a long and close relationship with Saddam's government. It was, in part, Mahmud's account of Iraqi officials' escape into Syria that prompted a U.S. strike last Wednesday on an Iraqi convoy along the Syrian border, U.S. defence department officials said. They said they had also intercepted conversations among fugitive Iraqi leaders indicating that the border region was the site of smuggling connected to those leaders. But U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he had no reason to believe that the convoy carried senior members of the Iraqi leadership. Hummmmm At a Pentagon news conference, Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said reports from the scene were still incomplete. They said they did not know whether the five Syrian border guards who were injured in the raid had challenged U.S. forces at all. The Syrian government has said nothing in public about the raid. Which is the most interesting part of this story, at least to me. Wonder what's up with that? |
| Posted by:Steve |