METransparent Exclusive:
The High level security officer who recently died in a Moscow hospital, was not the head of Syria’s Political Security Service, Jamil Hassan, as METransparent pretended on August 20. We were wrong.
It now seems certain that General Hassan was not present at the moment of the explosion which decimated part of Syria’s security officials. His name was leaked by Syria’s security organs to opposition sources in Beirut to hide a more important loss to the regime: Bashar Assad’s cousin and right-hand man, Hafez Makhlouf, was badly injured in the opposition’s attack against the country’s chiefs of security. He was immediately transported to Moscow in the hope of saving his life.
We already had doubts about the veracity of that news, especially when one of our syrian readers (who lives in Moscow) wrote to us saying that “an officer friend who accompanied the body of the deceased official said it was the man who died in Moscow was brother to one of Syria’s most prominent businessmen”. This new bit of information coincided with another information published by Russia Today: that Syria’s biggest businessman, Mohamed Makhlouf (brother of Hafiz Assad’ wite, Anissa Makhlouf) had travelled to Moscow on a private jet three days after the Damascus explosion which killed the minister of defense and a few security officials.
The syrian website all4syria.info, usually a reliable source, today confirmed the death of Hafez Makhlouf, a brother of Rami Makhlouf and a cousin of Bashar Assad. This should be a huge loss to Syria’s president, as Hafez Makhlouf was the personal representative of Bashar Assad in dealing with security agencies. He was the man tasked with clarifying the plot behind the assassination of Imad Mognieh.
Hafez Assad’s son!
However, our surprises did not stop at this dramatic event. When we failed to find a photo of Hafez Makhlouf, we contacted a dissident member of Syria’s “old guard”. His answer was even more troubling: Hafez Makhlouf was, physically, almost “a copy of the young Hafez Assad”!
Adding that “among the old guard everybody knew that Hafez Assad was the father of Hafez Makhlouf. It jumped out. The explanation was simple: the wife of Mohamed Makhlouf (brother to Assad’s wife, Anissa) was the mistress of Hafez Assad.
If this starts to look like a mafia thriller, it should be remembered that Syria has been governed by a mafia-style regime since the the 1970s.
Anyway, in conclusion, the high official security official whose body was returned to Syria one week ago was not a cousin of Bashar Assad but his own half brother!