Samaha, Shaaban Use Ambiguous Terms in Leaked Phone Calls

Around three years after media reports said Lebanese investigators were probing phone calls between ex-minister Michel Samaha and Syrian President Bashar Assad's adviser Buthaina Shaaban, the recordings were leaked to local TV networks on Wednesday.

The audio leaks follow several videos that were broadcast in the wake of Samaha's release on bail from prison under a controversial Military Court ruling that has sent shockwaves across the country.

Both Samaha and Shaaban use ambiguous and suspicious terms in the two phone calls.

“It would be great if we can finish and leave by the evening,” Samaha tells Shaaban in the first phone conversation.

“I have something to do and I need to go do it in order to start the work … You got me, right?” Samaha adds to justify why he needed to leave Syria for Lebanon the next day.

“Yes, I understand what you mean. May God give you strength … I need to give you the thing that I said I would give to you,” Shaaban answers him.

In another phone call with Samaha, apparently initiated by Shaaban, the Syrian president's adviser asks about the whereabouts of the ex-minister and former General Security chief Jamil al-Sayyed who was apparently with him in Syria.

“Tell me what is needed,” Samaha replies. “What is needed is that we go to the interior minister,” Shaaban tells him.

“Can I ask you to come pick him (al-Sayyed) up from in front of the Sheraton Hotel, I'm not going,” Samaha says at that point.

“I have another thing to do and I don't want to let him know of it. It has to do with the main issue that we had discussed,” Samaha tells Shaaban, again referring to al-Sayyed.

On Friday, al-Sayyed announced the end of his friendship with Samaha, accusing him of betraying his trust.

“Michel Samaha betrayed my trust and erred against me when he accompanied me from Damascus with him knowing what he was hiding in his car,” al-Sayyed said, referring to the explosives that Samaha smuggled in his car's trunk from Syria to Lebanon.

Both men are close to Syrian President Assad and to the Hizbullah-led March 8 camp in Lebanon.

Samaha, who was information minister from 1992 to 1995, was released in exchange for a bail payment of 150 million Lebanese pounds ($100,000), according the text of the Military Court's judgment.

Under his bail conditions, Samaha, 67, would be barred from leaving the country for at least one year, speaking to the press or using social media.

The ex-minister was arrested in August 2012 and charged with attempting to carry out "terrorist acts" over allegations that he and Syrian security services chief Ali Mamluk transported explosives and planned attacks and assassinations of political and religious figures in Lebanon.

Samaha was sentenced in May 2015 to four-and-half years in prison, but in June Lebanon's Cassation Court nullified the verdict and ordered a retrial.

Samaha, a former adviser to Assad, admitted during his trial that he had transported the explosives from Syria for use in attacks in Lebanon. He, however, argued he should be acquitted because he was a victim of entrapment by a Lebanese security services informer – Milad Kfoury.

Y.R.