Posted on 02/15/2003 8:02:03 PM PST by knak
Confusion surrounded the recent whereabouts of the right-hand man of Saddam Hussein's oldest son Uday after Iraqi exile groups claimed he had defected last week after disappearing from a hotel in Beirut.
The reports circulated for several days before Adeeb Shabaan emerged in Damascus last night and insisted that he was in Syria on an unspecified work trip and had not defected.
Mr Shaaban, 47, is officially head of the Iraqi Photographic Association and a Baghdad newspaper editor, but in practice he has for the past five years run Uday's private office and acted as his press officer.
He is based at Iraq's sinister Olympic Committee headquarters where the basement is a notorious torture centre.
Mr Shaaban, who has intimate knowledge of the Iraqi regime's sanctions-busting operations, had been sent to Lebanon by Uday to buy jewellery, according to Iraqi exiles in Damascus and London. They say that members of Saddam's family have been converting dollars into valuables as the threat of war comes closer.
Mr Shaaban and his colleagues had arrived in Beirut after attending a football competition in Saudi Arabia in their guise as a sports delegation. He is understood to have been travelling with several million dollars in cash to buy diamonds and jewellery.
"Uday cannot put the family's black money in the bank and he does not want huge hoards of cash, so he converts it into portable valuables," said Mashaan Jebouri, the Syria-based leader of the Homeland party, an Iraqi opposition group.
Mr Shaaban has been involved at the highest level in the lucrative business dealings that Saddam has entrusted to Uday. He knows first-hand how the regime flouts United Nations sanctions to fund Saddam's illegal weapons programmes and amass fortunes for the country's ruling elite.
"He knows all the secrets about the smuggling operations, the illegal oil sales, the front companies, all the black money business," said Abbas al-Janabi, a former senior Baghdad official now based in London.
According to the reports from exile groups, Mr Shaaban had been waiting with colleagues in a Beirut hotel car park for a vehicle to drive them back to Baghdad on Monday. He reportedly told them he had left his mobile phone charger in his room, went back into the building and vanished through another exit.
The account of his disappearance was given by Mr Jebouri, who said that the details were secretly provided to him by another member of Mr Shaaban's group. Other Iraqi exile factions gave similar versions of events.
Mr Shaaban is understood to have feared punishment after mishandling a recent business deal for Uday, who is notoriously cruel. Afeel Tavra, another senior official on the Olympics committee, recently had his hands and legs broken after falling foul of him.
Nothing was heard of Mr Shaaban for several days before he emerged in Damascus last night, blaming the Iraqi opposition for "making up information about my disappearance and defection to a Western embassy in Beirut" and describing himself as "one of Saddam's soldiers".
There was no explanation, however, of his whereabouts in the meantime. Iraqi intelligence agents attached to the embassies in Beirut and Damascus had been ordered to search for him.
that's probably what'll happen even if it was just the media making up a story
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