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Saddam's 'Search for Family Bolthole'
Saturday, November 16, 2002
(13:20 GMT)
By Paul Reynolds
BBC News Online
World Affairs Correspondent

Saddam's son Uday would stay in Iraq, the report says.
Image Credit: The Associated Press.

Stories about Saddam Hussein preparing an exit, for his family at least, have appeared before and provide a cautionary tale.

The London Times has published an intriguing story -- that Saddam Hussein has made plans to pay Libya $3.5bn to provide a safe haven for members of his family and his senior officials, though not, it seems for himself.

Saddam Hussein himself would make a last stand, perhaps with his elder son Uday who has in the last few days written in his own newspaper Babel about Iraq possibly striking first in any conflict.

What is one to make of this report?

I am first of all reminded of an incident just before the Gulf War of 1991.

In the basement briefing room of the Foreign Office in London, a British official showed several diplomatic correspondents a telegram from the British embassy in Mauritania, a remote half-desert country between the Sahara and the Atlantic.

This telegram indicated that Saddam Hussein's wife plus entourage of senior officials had arrived there in an Iraqi plane.

We all rushed into print or onto the air.

* Egg on faces
* Uday 'excluded'
* Scepticism
(More: BBC Online News Source)
2002 © The British Broadcasting Corporation.

Dan