(Based on Staff articles from the BBC & NY POST in August, 2021.)
Later in UAE he denied taking the money and blamed
Taliban for threatening to hang him like they did to late President Najibullah
in 1996 during the First Taliban Takeover of Afghanistan. Mohammad Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai (born 19 May
1949) is an Afghan politician, academic, and economist who served as President
of Afghanistan between September 2014 and August 2021.
Born in Logar Province, Ghani went to the United States in the 1960s to study and later completed a bachelor's at the American University in Beirut. He became a professor of anthropology at numerous institutions, mostly at Johns Hopkins University, before starting to work with the World Bank.
He returned to
Afghanistan in 2002 after the collapse of the Taliban government, serving as
the Finance Minister in Hamid Karzai's cabinet until his resignation in
December 2004 to become the dean of Kabul University.
An independent
politician and ideologically liberal, Ghani came in fourth in the 2009
presidential election. Ghani ran in the 2014 presidential election securing
less votes than rival Abdullah Abdullah in the first round, but winning a
majority in the second round.
Following
political chaos, the United States intervened to form a unity government. Ghani
was re-elected when the final results of the 2019 presidential elections were
announced after a long delay on 18 February 2020. He was sworn in as president
for a second five-year term on 9 March 2020.
On 15 August
2021, as the Taliban took control of the country in the fall of Kabul, he fled
the country by air landing in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. He then went to the United
Arab Emirates which granted him political asylum. During his escape, the
Afghanistan embassy in Tajikistan asked Interpol to apprehend him for embezzling
public funds.
Russia’s embassy in Kabul has said on Monday that
Ghani had fled the country with four cars and a helicopter full of cash and had
to leave some money behind as it would not all fit in, the RIA news agency
reported.
 |
| President Ghani fled with a helicopter load of cash. |
“As for the collapse of the (outgoing) regime, it is most eloquently characterized by the way Ghani fled Afghanistan,” Nikita Ishchenko, a Russian embassy spokesman in Kabul, was quoted as saying by Russian state-owned news outlet RIA, Reuters reported. “Four cars were full of money, they tried to stuff another part of the money into a helicopter, but not all of it fit. And some of the money was left lying on the tarmac,” Ishchenko was quoted as saying.
The Afghan embassy
in Tajikistan—one of the countries Ghani had previously been suspected of
fleeing to, before the UAE confirmed his presence—has now demanded his arrest
as well as that of former Afghan National Security adviser Hamdullah Mohib and
Ghani’s chief adviser Fazel Mahmood, Afghan outlet TOLO News reported.
But the ousted
president vowed to return to the country and denied allegations leveled by
Mohammad Zahir Aghbar, the Afghan ambassador to Tajikistan, who said that he
stole nearly $US169 ($AU237) million from the country as he fled in exile.
“Accusations were charged in these days that money was transferred, these
accusations are fully baseless,” Ghani said on Wednesday.
