It’s a Russian whodunit: How did Assad flee Syria?

Russia secretly squirrelled Assad out of Syria and tried to make it look like his plane had crashed, says Ukrainian intelligence.

It seems quite a few people knew that Bashar Assad had left Syria, but for an entire day no one knew where he went.

After Sunday’s downfall of the Syrian capital, Damascus, and the lightning-fast collapse of the Syrian government, there had not been a definitive sighting nor any message from the now ex-Syrian president. Hour after hour, his whereabouts were a mystery.

Certainly Assad wasn’t at any of his residences in Damascus when the rebels began ransacking them, looting furniture and other items as souvenirs throughout Sunday.

One video clip of Assad’s garage shows an eyewatering collection of very expensive Ferraris, Aston Martins, Rolls-Royces, BMWs, Mercedes and a rare ­Bugatti Veyron (only 450 were made).

The overthrow was complete within hours as Assad’s palaces throughout the country were ransacked and looted, local football teams changed names and even the Spanish embassy in Damascus swapped the Syrian flag for the rebel colours.

It take a bit longer, but early this morning Australian time the Russian TASS agency reported that Russia had granted Assad and his family asylum. Citing a Kremlin source, the agency said: “Assad and members of his family have arrived in Moscow. Russia granted them asylum on humanitarian grounds.”

Some hours after the coup in the early hours of Sunday. the US president-elect Donald Trump issued a message saying Assad has fled, indicating a knowledge that the Butcher of Damascus was no longer in the country.

“Assad is gone. He has fled his country,’’ Mr Trump said.

Israeli intelligence had also suggested that Assad, or his family, had moved out of Syria many hours before on Saturday evening, and quite some time before a mysterious plane out of the capital departed just as the rebel factions were closing in on the airport.

Russia had also confirmed that Assad had escaped. The Russian foreign ministry said: “As a result of negotiations between Bashar Assad and a number of participants in the armed conflict on the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic, he decided to resign from the presidency and left the country, giving instructions for a peaceful transfer of power.

In what would be an interesting interpretation of events, they added: “Russia did not participate in these negotiations.”

With modern technology – or the ability to manipulate the technology – it appears this last plane out of Damascus, a Syrian Air IL-76, headed north in Syria at 2am local time and then east to near Homs, where it appeared to descend and then disappear.

Social media immediately exploded with suggestions the plane had crashed. The flight path showed a steady U-turn and descent from 3650m to 1070m and the transponder or the radar detecting it, was turned off.

If indeed Assad or some of his relatives were on that flight, it could be that they were headed to Latakia on the Syrian coast where Russia has a military base.

A much earlier plane had left the same airport bound for the United Arab Emirates and there was also a flight bound for ­Moscow.

It was even thought Assad could have left the country much earlier.

The day before the rebel overthrow, there were suggestions he had already departed, with one report he was in Russia, another that he and his wife, Asma, and their two youngest children had taken refuge in Jordan.

At the time, his staff insisted Assad was still in Syria and working, yet there had been no sign of him and his Presidential Guard was missing from the New Shaab Palace, a hilltop mansion overlooking Damascus.

His advisers ridiculed reports of an escape as being false news.

Cue some interventions from Russia’s fiercest enemy closely monitoring all things Kremlin, the Ukraine Main Directorate of Intelligence. A few hours ago, they said Russia had been covering up an operation to rescue the Syrian president and those closest to him.

The Ukraine intelligence said Assad had indeed been on board that mystery plane and the loss of the radar signal was a deliberate Russian ploy to sow disinformation about the dictator’s whereabouts. It was an attempt to obfuscate whether Assad was alive and where he might be headed.

The Ukrainians said Russian generals were also being urgently evacuated and Russia had enlisted ships of the Baltic Fleet to remove personnel and equipment.

None of this is a big surprise: there are only a few places in the world with close enough ties to the Syrian leader to offer any form of asylum to such a brutal dictator.

It had always been expected that unless there was a dramatic plot twist, the next chapter was to reveal Assad was in Russia. And so it has unfolded.