In a lengthy telephone conversation on Tuesday, the former Iraqi electricity minister who escaped from a Baghdad jail on Sunday ridiculed US and Iraqi officials and said he fled because he did not trust the police and had received a tip that he would be assassinated within days.
The official, Aiham Alsammarae, who telephoned this reporter, said, without offering proof, that he was already outside Iraq after finagling his way aboard a flight at the Baghdad International Airport.
Incredulous Iraqi security and justice officials disputed parts of his account, saying that a figure as recognizable as Alsammarae could not possibly have slipped onto a flight when he was the subject of a manhunt.
Alsammarae, who holds dual US and Iraqi citizenship, scoffed at those assertions and said they were made by officials who spent too much time inside the protected Green Zone in central Baghdad and did not understand how the country really worked.
"Those suckers who are sitting in the Green Zone, they cannot go out and see the people they are governing?" asked Alsammarae, whose unmistakable speech patterns in English reflect his Iraqi and US backgrounds. "This is a joke."
"So why I cannot take the airport? It's not because I am a smart cookie. Any Iraqi can do it, even if they have 10,000 court orders against him. This is Iraq," he said.
One fact Iraqi officials could not dispute: Alsammarae, who had been jailed four months ago on corruption charges stemming from deals made when he was the electricity minister from August 2003 to May last year, was still free.
If correct, Alsammarae's tale of escape would mean that he not only worked his way free of the Iraqi police guarding the jail but also eluded the thousands of Western and Iraqi security forces stationed in the Green Zone.
When asked how he could have pulled off such an escape, Alsammarae, who moved to Chicago in 1976 but returned to Iraq just after the invasion, laughed uproariously for 20 seconds. Then, recycling a famous line from an exchange about Al Capone in The Untouchables, Alsammarae said with undisguised glee: "The Chicago way."
Although an appeals court overturned his only conviction last week, Alsammarae faced additional charges and it was unclear whether he could be freed on bail under Iraqi law.
Iraqi officials expressed consternation when informed that Alsammarae had telephoned a reporter while on the lam.
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