The Iraqi Governing Council is considering returning properties that were confiscated from departing Jews after the establishment of Israel, a senior source within the council told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday.

He said a 1951 law, which had deprived fleeing Iraqi Jews of their properties, is now under review. The aim of the revision is to restore the properties to their rightful owners.

"We are determined to return all the properties that were taken from the Iraqi Jews and all the others," he said.

In the meantime, he said he had assured representatives of Iraqi Jews who want to visit Iraq that they would be welcome and that the council would ensure their security...

He also said that Israel is to be frozen out of the bidding for lucrative reconstruction contracts: "We have no problem dealing with Jewish businessmen or with Israelis as private citizens," he said, "but we do not feel we owe anything to the State of Israel."

He revealed that the US administration in Iraq and the council have solid evidence of direct, top-level Syrian complicity in attacks against American and Iraqi security forces.

One of the two Iraqis captured with Saddam in the Tikrit area had acted as Saddam's personal envoy to Syrian President Bashar Assad until just six weeks before his arrest.

He also said that suicide bombers from various Arab countries had crossed into Iraq from Syria, carrying Syrian documents...

He also said that the governing council has acquired evidence that incriminates the most senior members of the Jordanian royal family in allegedly illegal and corrupt dealings with Saddam.

The council, he added, had acquired thousands of documents which expose a network of politicians throughout the Arab world and Europe – including the Vatican – who had accepted huge payments from Saddam in the form of "oil contracts" which were traded by the Iraqi regime on their behalf.

The documents, which were unearthed from the files of the Mukhabarat (secret police), the state oil company, and in Saddam's personal office, expose a vast and complex paper trail that reveals not only the identity of the corrupt politicians, but also how their cash was laundered.

One leading Jordanian politician received more than $3 million in a bank account in Cyprus, the favored first stop in the laundering process.
There is also evidence, he said, the Jordanian authorities had established a sophisticated operation for providing front companies that allowed Saddam to trade on the international market in defiance of UN sanctions. Vast "commissions" were paid to individual Jordanians for this.

The source said he believes it unlikely the Hashemite throne will survive the detailed revelations that will emerge in the coming months.
The governing council, he said, has already informed the Jordanian government that it has halted the arrangement by which Jordan was permitted to purchase Iraqi oil at substantial discounts.

"We will sell to them on the same terms as we sell to Guatamala," he said. "They will not have another cent from us."

And he said Iraq will end all exports of oil through the port of Aqaba, a major source of Jordanian income, within two years, by which time Iraq will have completed the reconstruction of its own storage and export facilities.

Saying that the absence of a hostile regime in Baghdad has reduced Israel's strategic dependence on the Hashemite kingdom as a buffer against Iraq, he predicted that Jordan would, sooner rather than later, become a Palestinian state...