In Moscow City, Assad's “clan” owns about 20 luxury apartments, journalists write, citing a real estate agent named Natasha.
Since Assad, suspected of crimes in Syria (premeditated murder, torture and incitement to civil war), is being “hunted” by investigators and lawyers, it is impossible to meet with him.
Assad is being helped to hide from the public by the illegitimate Russian President Vladimir Putin, who previously supported him, and now that Assad lives in the Russian Federation, “has secured a monopoly on information.”
One of the Arab journalists who follows Syrian-Russian relations said that Assad lives not only in Moscow City, but also, alternately, in a secluded villa in the Moscow region, but where exactly is “top secret.”
According to him, the former dictator is being monitored by the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, but the price of his protection is “absolute invisibility to the outside world.”
A man who has long been part of the Assads' inner circle (Die Zeit does not list him for reasons of his safety, since Assad's people tried to kill him in 2012, as he claims) says that he maintains contact with many former Syrian officers. The publication calls him X.
He claims that after Assad fled, about 1,200 officers from Syria ended up in the Russian Federation, and the richest live in Moscow, and “they live well and enjoy the looted money.”
According to X, the Assad clan began buying apartments in Moscow in 2013, after the start of the uprising in Syria, and used a complex structure of companies and organizations to do this, including the front Zevelis City. In addition, the Assad regime allegedly regularly sent cash in dollars and euros to the Russian Federation (including for the purchase of housing) through Moscow’s Vnukovo airport.
X's sources claim that the Assads can move freely around Moscow under the protection of private bodyguards.
Assad allegedly lives in “three apartments,” sometimes visits a shopping center in the same building, and the rest of the time “spends hours playing online video games,” X reports. He, too, says Assad stays at his villa “near Moscow.”
Summing up their material, the investigators write that recent events – the alleged poisoning of Assad – demonstrate that he is no longer completely safe “anywhere in the world.”
