I am completely fascinated by the story of Asma al-Assad, the British born wife of the Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president and brutal dictator who fled into exile in Russia on December 8th.

I’ve kept wondering as we read about the horrors of Assad’s Syria: How did this beautiful, privileged woman who grew up in Acton, a London suburb, and who worked for JP Morgan come to be the Lady Macbeth of the Middle East, someone who is banned from her native Britain, sanctioned by the US and reviled by the West?

She’s only a few years younger than me and some of my closest British friends overlapped with her at JP Morgan.

It’s a conundrum that has sat with me.

So, these past two weeks, I’ve phoned around sources in the Middle East – and in a stroke of luck – I got to Asma’s cousin, Abdu al-Dabbagh, 59. As you might imagine, given Abdu is an Assad relative, he fled Syria in a hurry on Sunday December 8th, hours after Bashar left, and is now residing in a rental home in Beirut, Lebanon.

Abdu is a Syrian “businessman” who tells me he owns some jewelry stores in Dubai. He moved his businesses out of Syria in 2000 because he determined (correctly) very early on in Bashar Assad’s presidency that Assad would appropriate all the private businesses he could to line his own coffers. Bashar’s cousin and uncle were already running a monopoly even then.

Despite the family ties, (Abdu’s mother, Saadat Otri is Asma Assad’s mother’s sister) there is no love lost between him and Bashar Assad, who, he says, put him into solitary confinement in January, where guards peed into his drinking water and onto his blanket – all because he criticized the five “illiterates” running the Syrian economy. He was released he says because he went on a hunger-strike and his mother put pressure on Asma.

And yet fifty years ago Abdu and Bashar were childhood best friends. In the same class. In the same school. And Abdu’s father, Ahmed Adnan Dabbagh, was the Syrian Minister of Intelligence and then the Interior under Bashar’s father, President Hafez Assad, who was an even more tyrannical ruler than his son. Abdu says, that Hafez Bassad crammed the jails so full of people that they were so squashed that the myth spread they had to sleep standing up.

Abdu tells me that contrary to what Bashar al-Assad has said recently from Moscow – that he never planned to flee – that there were definitely clues that he was planning to leave Syria to go into exile the week before December 8th.

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates