Killer Got U.N. Oil Reward

Niles Lathem
April 19, 2004 
The New York Post
http://www.defenddemocracy.org/research_topics/research_topics_show.htm?doc_id=222395&attrib_id=9059

In a sinister oil-for-murder plot, Saddam Hussein used the scandal-plagued U.N. oil-for-food program to set up the assassination of a prominent Iraqi exile politician, the slain man's family has charged. 
A mysterious George Tarkhaynan appears on an Iraqi Oil Ministry list, published by a Baghdad newspaper, of 270 politicians and businessmen who received sweetheart oil deals under the U.N. humanitarian program. 
Safia al-Souhail, a leading political figure in post-Saddam Iraq, told The Post she has evidence that Tarkhaynan is a former Beirut shirtmaker and once-trusted family friend who helped Iraq assassinate her father, anti-Saddam dissident Sheik Taleb al-Souhail al-Tamimi, in Lebanon in 1994. 
George Tarkhaynan was a good agent for them. He facilitated the killing of my father who was an enemy of the regime. This oil voucher was like a present for what he did, al-Souhail said by phone from Baghdad. 
The plot is the latest allegation to surface in the mushrooming U.N. scandal in which Saddam is said to have pocketed a staggering $10.1 billion through illegal oil sales and kickbacks. 
Tarkhaynan and three Iraqi diplomats in Beirut spent two years in jail for murdering the 64-year old al-Souhail, who had helped organize an unsuccessful 1993 coup against Saddam. 
Although media reports at the time said Lebanese prosecutors had solid evidence against them, including coded messages from Baghdad, they were released in 1996 and sent to Iraq as part of a controversial deal to reopen economic ties between the two countries. 
Tarkhaynan was later allocated vouchers enabling him to buy up to 7 million barrels of Iraqi oil at below-market prices that could be resold at profits of between 25 and 50 cents a barrel. 
That means he was slated to receive up to $3.5 million in oil profits. 
Al-Souhail was outraged to learn that Tarkhaynan and others had gotten oil deals. 
These people were covering for Saddam, they were lobbying for him . . The money they got belongs to the Iraqi people, she said. 
Tarkhaynan, who has in the past protested his innocence, could not be reached for comment. 
Al-Souhail said Tarkhaynan spent at least seven years in Iraq after being sprung from jail and fled Baghdad days before Saddam fell. She said he'd been employed by the State Oil Marketing Organization, which sold Iraqi oil abroad, and was often a point of contact for foreigners seeking deals with SOMO under the U.N. program. 
Al-Souhail described Tarkhaynan as a trusted advisor to her father, who fled Iraq in 1968.