Friday, April 18, 2003
©2003 Associated PressURL: http://www.lucianne.com/threads2.asp?artnum=33095
(04-18) 21:17 PDT LOS ANGELES (AP) --
Two Army sergeants in Baghdad stumbled across a sealed-up cottage that led to the discovery of an estimated $650 million in U.S. currency, the Los Angeles Times reported Friday.
The sergeants tore down a cinderblock and concrete barricade blocking the cottage door and found 40 sealed, galvanized aluminum boxes lined up on the floor. Breaking open one box, they discovered 40 sealed stacks of uncirculated $100 bills -- $100,000 per stack, or $4 million in the box. In all, the 40 boxes were assumed to contain $160 million.
"I need to call my wife and tell her we were multimillionaires for about three seconds," Staff Sgt. Kenneth Buff said as he stood next to a box stuffed with sealed bundles of currency.
In an adjacent cottage in an exclusive Tigris River neighborhood where senior Baath Party and Republican Guard officials had lived, the sergeants found another 40 aluminum boxes assumed to contain another $160 million in currency.
Their discovery set off a nighttime search of abandoned mansion estates tucked among parks and canals. By 11 p.m., soldiers of the 3rd Infantry Division had found two more cottages containing at least 84 more boxes presumed to hold $336 million in cash, for a total of $656 million.
The loot apparently was hidden by fleeing Baath Party members and senior Republican Guard commanders who had lived in the wooded neighborhood just east of Saddam Hussein's presidential palace, the Times said in the story posted on its Web site Friday night.
Officials did not immediately confirm that the currency was legal tender, but an Army private who said he had worked for an armored car company examined the bills and called them genuine.
Taylor Griffin, a U.S. Treasury spokesman, offered assurances that any cash retrieved from Saddam's government would be held aside for the people of Iraq.
The cash boxes were loaded onto trucks and escorted by military police to division headquarters at Baghdad's international airport for counting and security.
Officials said they did not know the source of the currency.
A former Iraqi official who requested anonymity said Saddam's government received hard currency for illicit oil smuggling activity that has been said to have provided a critical source of revenue not subject to United Nations oversight.
At the time of the first Gulf war in 1991, the former official said, Saddam's government accumulated a cash hoard of $4 billion to $6 billion.
©2003 Associated Press
