The mystery of Saddam Hussein's vault

Saddam's wealth during his reign has been the subject of intense scrutiny by authorities around the world, even though the dictator has been dead for years. An investigation into the murder of an Iraqi-born British engineer and his family in the French Alps has revealed the tip of the iceberg of Saddam Hussein's secret vault, the Daily Mail reported.

The massacre in the Alps

Saad Shiri, 50, took his wife Iqbal, 47, mother-in-law Susila Ayraf, 74, eldest daughter Zaynab, seven, and youngest daughter Zena, four, on a holiday to the Alps on September 5, 2012.

Healy was driving a BMW as the family drove on the mountain roads around the Alpine village of Anzysavaran. Zayna sat in the middle of the back seat, flanked by her mother and grandmother, while Zaynab sat in the passenger seat.

The Alpine scenery attracted a tired driver, Mr. Healy pulled over to the side of the road and got out with Mr. Zarnab, talking, laughing, and stretching. At this moment, a Frenchman, Morrill, was riding a bicycle just past them.

Suddenly, a gunshot broke the silence of the Alps. The tragedy happened in a flash when Shiri, Zainab, and Morrill, who were passing by, were all shot by a gunman. At that moment, thinking of his wife and daughter in the car, Healy, despite the pain, climbed back into the car, locked the door, and tried to start it. Unfortunately, as the car turned around, it got stuck in a puddle. In the panic, the car sank deeper and deeper, and the bullet whizzed again, hitting Healy just in the head, and killing him.

The murderer did not stop but continued to shoot into the car, Iqbal and Alaf also have been killed.

Fortunately, in the first few seconds of gunfire, mother Iqbal quickly unbuckled Zena's seat belt next to her and told her, "Hide and don't make a sound!" It was during those few seconds that Zena left her seat and lay nervously at her mother's feet, who covered her with her large skirt. Zena, only four, had her eyes closed and was smart enough not to cry out in fear.

Then Zena heard the killer's voice. -- He was a man who answered the phone and said only, "They're all dead." Zena lay quietly at her mother's feet, holding her breath, bewildered. Surrounded by the calm of the disaster and the smell of her parents' blood, she trembled with terror.

When the police arrived at the scene, everything was quiet again. They found Zena shivering at Iqbel's feet. Though unscathed, Zena was clearly in shock and completely stunned.

Zainab was found breathing by police. However, she suffered severe head trauma, and the police speculate that Zaynab survived because the killer ran out of bullets, which by one count totaled 25.

Immediately after the shooting, the French and British governments are highly concerned. French President Francois Hollande publicly pledged at a news conference during a visit to London that the perpetrators of the shooting would be caught. A special investigation team was set up to investigate the case, led by Eric Mehrard, the first prosecutor of the city of Ancey.

Eric started with the victim, Healy. She is an ordinary British man of Iraqi descent who lives with his family in a neighborhood in Surrey, southeast England. Mr. Healy, who has degrees in engineering and computer science, has been an engineer for the past 20 years and officially became a British citizen in 2002.

Amazingly, Sheary used to work for Surrey Satellite Technology in the UK. This led Eric to speculate that he was most likely the target of Iranian spies, who wanted high-resolution satellite technology. However, after investigation, the police denied this claim. According to the police's examination of the scene and the bullets, the killer used a Ruger P08 pistol with a life of up to 60 years.

Eric then investigates Healy's mother-in-law, Elaf, who was also one of the victims. Since her husband died in 2011, she has lived in Sweden with her mentally ill son Hyde, 46. Aylaff's neighbors said they had not seen Hyde for a month. Hyde, who suffers from schizophrenia, has been arrested several times for making violent threats against his mother, according to court documents.

After ruling out the possibility of a psychopath, Eric's investigation stalled. As he struggled, a family photo of Healy's dead father caught his eye -- an old man Eric had seen on the news. Shiri's father Katim was a former member of Saddam Hussein's army and the family lived in Baghdad. He fled to Britain with his family after a very public disagreement with Saddam Hussein.

The mantis catches the cicada finch after

Eric reported the case to French intelligence after learning that Shiri's father, Kim, had been an old follower of Saddam Hussein.

The investigation revealed that Shiri's father Katim had helped Saddam launder money through companies he ran as a close aide of Saddam Hussein during the period of his financial madness. In the late 1970s, however, he fell out completely with Saddam Hussein and moved his family out of Baghdad, and settled in Britain. A few years later, Al-Mahadi and two of his associates, who had also been laundering money for Saddam, were summoned to Baghdad and executed by Saddam, raising suspicions that they had done the laundering on his behalf and were said to have "bleached" $2 billion.

Did the Healys get killed for laundering money, too? Eric started going house to house in the Healy neighborhood, hoping for more clues. Brown, a neighbor of the Healys, said the Healys had a very good relationship with the neighborhood, and the two families were close to each other like family. But when Kim died in 2011, he left his two sons millions of pounds. Shiri's brother Zaid, however, has been trying to keep the inheritance for himself. Healy, who believed that intelligence agencies were spying on him, did not take any precautions against his brother. The resort Sheary chose this time is just an hour's drive from the southwestern Swiss city of Geneva, making it easy to drop by to clean up an account. Only to die in the professional brother hired to kill pistols!

At this point, the case fell into another mystery. A multimillion-pound inheritance, and in Kim's position, there's no way to get that kind of money, so where does it come from?

As Eric searches for answers to the money's origins, the police uncover secret accounts held by the Healys in France and Switzerland. An intelligence agent in Munich had revealed that the money in these accounts was left by Saddam Hussein. The source of Saddam's secret money was discovered by the German BND.

The BND knew where the money was going and how to track it. They spent decades monitoring cash transactions between Western countries and Iraq.

The mystery of Saddam Hussein's vault

The truth finally came to light with the in-depth investigation by the intelligence agencies of various countries. It turns out that in the late 1970s, Kim and Saddam had fallen out as a cover story.

Born in 1937 to a poor family near a river in Tikrit, Iraq, Saddam Hussein was orphaned. At that time, his house was built of adobe, and Saddam, accustomed to cold words, was determined from childhood to make a lot of money and get rid of the poor life.

After taking office as Iraq's president in 1979, Saddam began using his power to make a fortune. Before the 1991 Gulf War, a senior Iraqi official who defected told world media that Saddam Hussein's wealth was estimated at $10 billion.

Between 1997 and 2001, Saddam and his son Uday pocketed a whopping $6 billion through kickbacks and smuggling under the United Nations' oil-for-food program. Most of the money is made through illegal oil exports to countries such as Turkey and Jordan, while some are made by controlling tobacco imports.

In the 1970s, one of Saddam's men, Katim, built a vast network of companies in the Swiss city of Lugano, dealing in finance, tourism, real estate, oil, and tobacco. He registered companies in Italy and the tax haven of Liechtenstein then used them to make complex circular transactions in areas such as financial tourism real estate, oil, and tobacco, and finally laundered money. In Liechtenstein, local corporate-registry offices can easily register companies for foreigners without having to show the authorities who own them.

Soon, Mr. Tim is suspected of money laundering, Saddam Hussein and Saddam Hussein and staged a programs meter, pretend to fall out, all in politics, and subsequently executed two men involved, Tim took out of Baghdad, with his family settled in the UK, and began to work in the UK, helping Saddam transfer funds. Millions of dollars were left in a Geneva bank because there was so much money laundering, so many accounts, that they got lost in the cycle of money laundering.

What is certain is that Saddam built an unimaginably vast network of companies, known to the United States as "Saddam Companies," with investments all over the world, including Panama, Switzerland, France, Germany, Britain, Cyprus, and Italy. Most of these businesses are highly secretive, but there are also open projects.

In March 2006, Forbes magazine ranked Saddam Hussein among the top 10 richest leaders in the world with a fortune of $2 billion. Business Week cited U.S. official and private estimates that Saddam and his family may have $7 billion to $10 billion in assets stashed overseas. U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage also put Saddam's wealth at around $7 billion. CBS News reported that Saddam Hussein's assets around the world are estimated to be between $10 billion and $20 billion, and are growing in value. As with Iraq's dubious Arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, the extent of Saddam's fortune remains a mystery.

As the U.S. government stepped up its search for Saddam with a $25 million bounty, it was also secretly searching for his vast fortune. As U.S. forces occupied Baghdad, investigators found that large sums of money were being transferred from bank accounts controlled by the Iraqi government to private accounts in the Middle East.

On December 30, 2006, Saddam was executed by hanging. Saddam's death has taken the mystery of his fortune to the grave. But countries around the world have not let down their guard, still keeping an eye on the latest developments in Saddam's vault, and each secretly searched the vault, eager to get a share of the money.