Syria's Assad let exiled uncle return to avoid imprisonment

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has allowed his uncle, who faces a jail term in France, to return after over three decades in exile, a local pro-government newspaper reported.

Rifaat al-Assad, 84, was sentenced to four years in prison last year for illegally using Syrian government funds to build a real estate empire in France.

He arrived in Damascus on Thursday, after Assad allowed him back into the country "to prevent his imprisonment," Al-Watan reported late Friday.

According to the paper, the returnee will not take on a political role in the country.

Notorious 'Butcher of Hama' 

Rifaat al-Assad, a former vice president, led a failed coup attempt and was exiled in 1984 by his late brother Hafez, the former president and father of Bashar al-Assad.

He is also known as the "Butcher of Hama" for his reported role in brutally putting down an uprising in the central Syrian city in 1982.

The death toll from the incident, which came to be known as the Hama massacre, is estimated to be about 20,000.

He has also been linked to the 1980 killings of hundreds of prisoners in Syria, as well as Syrian army abuses in Lebanon during the civil war in the 1970s and early 1980s.

His return to Syria comes a month after a Paris appeals court upheld a four-year prison sentence issued against him last year for laundering misappropriated funds from Syria in France. His properties in Europe were also seized.

Rifaat did not attend the Paris trial because he was in poor health, his lawyer, who appealed the decision, said at the time.

€90 million empire

In 2013, Transparency International and French anti-corruption group Sherpa filed a complaint accusing him of using shell companies in tax havens to launder public funds from Syria into France.

He owns several dozen apartments and two luxury townhouses in the French capital, reportedly valued at €90 million ($104 million).

The watchdogs reported that the money in Rifaat's possession far exceeded his possible earnings as a vice president and military commander in Syria.

He was convicted of money laundering and diversion of public funds, but denied the charges, claiming that he accumulated funds from gifts he received from his 16 children and Saudi royals.

Rifaat was briefly allowed back into Syria in the 1990s to attend his mother's funeral — but he was forced to leave soon after.

Syrian sources who declined to be identified confirmed Rifaat's return to the DPA news agency and said he was likely to reside in his hometown of al-Qardah, in the coastal province of Latakia.

France and Syria have not released official comments on the matter.

go/rc (AP, dpa)