The Lebanese government has handed over this past Friday to Iraq Abdullah Yasser Al Sabawi, grandson of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, five months after his arrest for his possible involvement in one of the largest massacres committed by the jihadist organization Islamic State, the one perpetrated in 2014 at the Iraqi military academy of Camp Speicher, in which more than a thousand cadets and Shiite militiamen were executed.
The arrest of Abdullah Yasser Sabawi al-Hasan, grandson of Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hasan, half-brother of the dictator, was finally announced by the Lebanese National Security Agency in August after several weeks of unverified information about his arrest.
«The Interpol police formations in the Arab and International Police Directorate of the Ministry of Interior, after an exceptional effort and an intelligence sweep, succeeded in recovering the accused, in accordance with the provisions of Article 4 of terrorism of the Lebanese Republic,» the Iraqi Ministry of Interior said in a statement on its website.
Sabawi was arrested last June 13 in the Lebanese city of Jbeil, pursuant to an Interpol arrest warrant for his alleged links to the Islamic State and, specifically, his possible connection to the Camp Speicher massacre.
The detainee had sought refuge in Lebanon in 2018 along with his family, after having lived in Yemen following the fall of the Hussein regime.
Abdullah’s uncle, Saad Sabawi Ibrahim al Hassan, has denounced to the Al Arabiya channel the existence of an «international conspiracy» to organize the surrender of his nephew who, if tried and found guilty of the charges against him, could end up executed by hanging, like his grandfather.
The Camp Speicher massacre occurred on June 12, 2014, when Islamic State killed between 1,095 and 1,700 Iraqi cadets and Shiite militiamen after storming this facility in the Iraqi province of Tikrit.
At the time of the massacre, there were between 5,000 and 10,000 unarmed cadets in the camp. The jihadists singled out Shiites and non-Muslims for execution.
