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Iraqi linked to Bush snr held
25/04/2003 22:10 - (SA)
Washington - US forces apprehended a former senior Iraqi intelligence official on Friday near the Syrian border in Iraq, netting a figure associated with an alleged 1993 plot to assassinate former president George Bush in Kuwait, a US official said.
Farouk Hijazi, who last served as Iraq's ambassador to Tunisia, was the number-three person in Iraqi intelligence at the time of the plot to kill current President George W Bush's father.
"He is in US custody," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "He was taken in Iraq, somewhere near the Syrian border."
Hijazi's capture, which came a day after the surrender of former deputy prime minister Tareq Aziz, gives US investigators an opportunity to probe his role in the Bush plot as well as alleged Iraqi connections to al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups.
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Hijazi's capture was "significant."
"He could know a lot of history," said General Richard Myers, the chair of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The 1993 plot called for killing Bush with remote-controlled car bombs that would be detonated as he made a triumphal visit to Kuwait City honouring him for the 1991 liberation of Kuwait from Iraqi occupation.
Kuwaiti authorities broke up the plot, and the explosives that were to be used were traced to Iraq.
The United States retaliated in June 1993 by firing 23 sea-launched cruise missiles at the headquarters of the Iraqi intelligence service.
Hijazi also is reported to have met in the past with Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But US officials were unable to corroborate those reports.
A US defence official said that Hijazi may have had connections with terrorist groups while serving as ambassador to Tunisia and in other diplomatic postings.
"The fact that Iraq's intelligence service is basically a terrorist organisation run through their embassies, that would seem like a likely connection," said the official, who asked not to be identified.
"There was a large al-Qaeda presence in Tunisia," the official added.
Link to al-Qaeda
US suspicions of an Iraqi connection to al-Qaeda were among the rationales US leaders used to justify the invasion of Iraq.
While senior US officials have said they have no evidence of an Iraqi connection to the September 11 attacks, Rumsfeld contended before the war that Iraq had a decade-old relationship with al-Qaeda.
He charged that a senior al-Qaeda official had received medical treatment in Baghdad after the war in Afghanistan, and that the regime was protecting an al-Qaeda group in northern Iraq, Ansar al-Islam, whose enclave was struck in the early days of the war.
US forces also have taken into custody the leader of the Palestine Liberation Front, Abu Abbas, the alleged mastermind of the 1985 hijacking of the Italian liner Achille Lauro, in which a wheelchair-bound American tourist was murdered and thrown overboard.
Of the more than a dozen top Iraqi officials taken into US custody so far, several were intelligence officials who might be in a position to shed light on Iraqi terrorist connections.
They include Barzan Ibrahim Hasan al-Tikriti, Saddam's half-brother, who was the former head of the intelligence service and a presidential adviser; Zuhayr Talib Abd al-Sattar al-Naqib, the director of military intelligence; and Salim Sa'id Khalaf al-Jumayli, the chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service's American desk.
- AFX
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