Bashar al-Assad’s uncle Rifaat al-Assad took a plane from Beirut airport, a Lebanese security source said on Saturday.
The former head of the elite forces of the Hafez el-Assad regime, now 87 years old, is accused by the Swiss federal prosecutor of having “ordered murders, acts of torture, cruel treatment and illegal detentions. These “war crimes and crimes against humanity” in 1982, during the bloody repression of an Islamist insurrection in Hama, left between 10,000 and 40,000 dead.
Rifaat al-Assad arrived in Lebanon by land and “took a flight from Beirut airport normally, because there was no Interpol notice concerning him,” the security source told AFP . He was not wanted by General Security in Lebanon and no other warrant justified his arrest, said this source who requested anonymity, not being authorized to speak to the press.
Rifaat al-Assad, who was “in possession of a diplomatic passport,” left Lebanon about a week ago, she said, without specifying her destination. According to several media, including France24, the man nicknamed the “butcher of Hama” would have gone to Dubai.
Bouthaïna Chaabane, Hafez al-Assad’s former translator and his son’s main political advisor, also managed to take a flight at Beirut airport, with a diplomatic passport, according to the same source. One of her friends told AFP that she had gone to Lebanon on the night of December 7 to 8, before heading to Abu Dhabi.
It was during that night that a coalition of armed groups, led by the Islamists of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), took control of Damascus and marked the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s power.
Rifaat al-Assad left Syria in 1984 after a failed coup attempt against his brother Hafez. Presenting himself as an opponent of Bashar al-Assad, he had spent 37 years in exile in France, before returning to Syria in 2021 to escape a four-year prison sentence which had been imposed on him in France for gang money laundering. organized and embezzlement of Syrian public funds.
In mid-December, Swiss media revealed that the federal criminal court had informed the civil parties, victims, that it was considering “closing the procedure” concerning Rifaat al-Assad. According to the court, he suffered from illnesses preventing him from traveling and participating in his trial, reported “Le Matin Dimanche” and “SonntagsZeitung”.
