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BEIRUT (AP) – President Bashar Assad has allowed his exiled uncle to return to Syria to avoid serving a four-year prison sentence in France, where he spent more than 30 years, a pro-newspaper reported on Friday evening. government.
Rifaat Assad, 83, was convicted last year for illegally using Syrian state funds to build a French real estate empire. He was tried in absentia for medical reasons and his lawyer appealed against the decision.
There was no immediate comment from France. Only Al-Watan, a pro-government Syrian newspaper, reported the return of Assad, who fled Syria in 1984 after a failed coup attempt against his brother, the late President Hafez Assad.
Al-Watan said President Bashar Assad forgave his uncle. He offered no further details.
It was a dramatic fall-out between the brothers. Rifaat Assad had been vice president and senior commander of the Syrian army.
He has been dubbed “the butcher of Hama” after human rights groups claimed to have overseen an attack that crushed a 1982 uprising in Syria’s central-west Hama province. Rifaat Assad denied any role in what has been called the Hama massacre. It has also been linked to the murders of hundreds of prisoners in 1980 and the Syrian army atrocities in Lebanon in the 1970s and early 1980s.
Al-Watan said Rifaat Assad returned on Thursday, adding that he learned from anonymous sources that he was allowed to return to prevent him from serving a prison sentence and after his properties in Europe were confiscated.
Transparency International and the French anti-corruption group Sherpa filed a complaint in 2013 accusing Rifaat Assad of using shell companies in tax havens to launder Syrian public funds to France. Its French heritage, which includes several dozen apartments and two luxury townhouses in Paris, has been valued at 90 million euros ($ 99.5 million). Watch groups say the sum is far beyond what he could have earned as Syrian vice president and military commander.
Assad, who was convicted of money laundering and embezzlement of public funds, denied any wrongdoing. He said the funds that enabled him to purchase his French real estate came from generous gifts from his 16 children and the Saudi royal family.
Rifaat is also under investigation in Switzerland for war crimes linked to the Hama massacre in 1982.
The late President Hafez Assad allowed his younger brother to return briefly to Syria in the 1990s to attend his mother’s funeral. But Rifaat Assad was quickly declared persona non grata and forced to leave as he was seen as a danger to the father-to-son succession plan.
Rifaat Assad questioned the constitutionality of Bashar Assad’s coming to power in 2000 and organized opposition to his government from abroad. But he would have no political weight within the opposition, which had deep mistrust of the ambitious former military commander.
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