Washington: Qatar made secret payments totalling at least $275 million to Iraqi and Iranian officials to secure a hostage release last year, intercepted messages suggest.
The payments were made just days after a 25-member Qatari hunting party, including nine members of the royal family, were released last year after being kidnapped in southern Iraq, according to a conversation between the Qatari Foreign Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani and its ambassador to Iraq, Zayed bin Saeed Al Khayareen, who served as chief negotiator, the Washington Post reported.
The Qataris were abducted in southern Iraq in December 2015 and, although no group publicly claimed responsibility, the intercepted communications appear to show Doha dealing with a wide range of actors to obtain their release.
At least $50 million was set aside for “Qassem”, or Qassem Soleimani, the shadowy leader of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force that sponsors Tehran’s proxy groups across the Middle East, including Hizbollah in Lebanon, Houthi rebels in Yemen and Shi’ite militias in Iraq.
At least $150m was handed to five individual intermediaries in total, the Post said, including the leader of Kataeb Hizbollah, an Iran-backed Iraqi militant group marked by the US as a
foreign terrorist organisation.
Included in the deal were also Hizbollah and the Al Nusra Front, a Syria-based extremist group with links to Al Qaeda.
The ransom payments, which Qatar has denied making, have been widely criticised by other Gulf Arab states for providing funding to terrorist organisations.
“The Syrians, ‘Hizbollah’-Lebanon, the Iraqi Hezbollah – all want money, and this is their chance,” Zayed bin Saeed Al Khayareen, Qatar’s ambassador to Iraq and chief negotiator in the hostage affair, wrote in a message. “All of them are thieves.”
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The total sum demanded for the return of the hostages at times climbed as high as $1 billion, although it is not clear from the documents exactly how much money ultimately changed hands, the Post reported.
The Qatari officials’ phone conversations, text messages and voicemail messages were recorded by a foreign government who provided them to the Post on the condition it was not named, the newspaper said.
The intercepted communications also include cellphone conversations and voice-mail messages in Arabic that were played for Post reporters for authentication purposes.