Saddam’s relative’s lawyer: Lebanon handed him over to Iraq as part of a political deal

The lawyer for the nephew of one of the brothers of the late Iraqi president Saddam Hussein said on Sunday that his client has no connection with ISIS, but has been extradited. in Iraq as part of a political agreement with the Lebanese authorities.

Bushra al-Khalil told The Associated Press that his client, Abdullah Yasser al-Sabawi, was living in Yemen in June 2014, when ISIS elements killed hundreds of Iraqi forces in central Iraq.

He said Lebanese authorities handed Abdullah over to Iraq last Friday, despite his registration as a refugee in Lebanon, denying any connection with the massacre.

ISIS captured around 1,700 Iraqi soldiers after seizing Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit in 2014.

The soldiers were trying to escape from nearby Camp Speicher, a former US base outside the northern Iraq city.

Subsequently, the organization posted images of gunmen shooting at soldiers after forcing them to lie face down in below in a shallow pit.

Abdullah is the grandson of Saddam’s half-brother, Sabawi Ibrahim, who was sentenced to death by an Iraqi court in 2009 and remained in prison until his death from cancer four years after the sentence.

Bushra Al-Khalil said that Yasser, Abdullah’s father, is in prison in Iraq.

Al-Khalil, who defended Saddam during his Baghdad trial before being hanged in December 2006, noted that Abdullah left Iraq in 2003 when he was eight. in following the US-led invasion of Iraq and relocated in Yemen, where he got Yemenis after his family was stripped of Iraqi citizenship.

He added that the first time Abdullah left Yemen was at the end of September 2014, three months after the killing of Iraqi soldiers, when he moved. in Jordan.

He also said that the young man has moved in Lebanon in 2019 and asked for political asylum in the hope of resettling it in Great Britain to marry an Iraqi woman.

And Bushra Al-Khalil pointed out that Abdullah had been detained for several months, and was questioned by the authorities, who did not find prove to condemn him.

Al-Khalil explained that he provided the Lebanese authorities with all documents showing that Abdullah did not leave Yemen until September 2014, when he was a university student at the time.

Al-Khalil said the “handover was part of an agreement” between Lebanese and Iraqi officials, adding that Abdullah should not have been handed over to Iraq because he is a Yemeni citizen.