BAGHDAD, 7 May 2003 — Members of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s regime and family stole nearly one billion dollars from Iraq’s Central Bank shortly before the US-led invasion of Iraq began in March, the US State Department said yesterday.
Spokesman Richard Boucher said US Treasury Department officials now in Baghdad learned of the theft from their Iraqi counterparts.
The charges appeared to be backed up by the discovery last month of massive amounts of cash in one of Saddam’s houses and inside an armored vehicle.
“We do know from Treasury Department officials in Baghdad that approximately one billion dollars was taken from the Iraqi Central Bank by Saddam Hussein and his family just prior to the start of combat operations,” he told reporters.
“We are working to hunt down the assets that were stolen by the regime,” Boucher said. “We’ll actively follow up on all the leads.”
The assets “are the property of the Iraqi people and should be returned to them ... but at this point we don’t know where this specific cash ended up,” he added.
Earlier yesterday, a US Treasury official confirmed a New York Times report stating that about $900 million had been taken from the Iraqi Central Bank either by members of Saddam’s family or his government.
According to the Times, Saddam sent his son, Qusay, to the bank’s vaults to load the cash onto three tractor trailers, hours before the first US bombs rained on Baghdad.
Neither Boucher nor the Treasury official could confirm the details.
Qusay reportedly turned up at the vaults at 4 a.m. local time on March 18 with a letter from Saddam authorizing the seizure, according to the report, in what could be the biggest bank heist in history.
In another important development, initial examination of a tractor-trailer truck turned over to US forces in Iraq indicates it might have been a mobile chemical or biological weapons laboratory, a defense official said yesterday.
“We have something that is interesting and we continue to look at it,” the official told Reuters. “Preliminary indications are that it perhaps was part of a mobile chem-bio arms system.”
The official, who asked not to be identified, stressed no evidence had been found so far of the presence of such weapons of mass destruction despite investigations of several sites since US-led forces invaded Iraq seven weeks ago.
“It (the truck) was turned over to US forces by Iraqis in late April” in northern Iraq, the official said.
In Paris, a US official told reporters yesterday that Washington might be “quite close” to announcing evidence that weapons of mass destruction had been found.
US forces have been scouring Iraq for evidence of chemical and biological weapons and nuclear weapon development, including possible wheeled laboratories. The United States cited the need to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction as a key reason for the war that toppled Saddam Hussein.
“There is no question that we are going to find weapons of mass destruction and the infrastructure that goes with the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction. And I think, actually, that announcements are quite close,” said the US official in Paris, who asked not to be identified.
