DOHA – Details have emerged about the hostage crisis of Qatar’s rulingfamily which took place nearly three years ago.

A Qatari royal hunting party had apparently been kidnapped and held forransom whilst in Iraq during December 2015, two members of whom wererelatives of Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, slated to become thenext foreign minister of Qatar at the time, Khaleej Times has reported.

Negotiations throughout the 16-month crisis led to a Qatar Airways planetaking money to Baghdad in exchange for the hostages in April of 2017.

It appears that in a series of text messages, over a billion dollars inransom money was potentially paid to persons who have been identified asterrorists by the US government, including Kataib Hezbollah in Iraq,General Qasem Soleimani in Iran, Hayat Tahrir al Sham (Al Nusra Front) inSyria.

Text messages between the Qatari Ambassador to Iraq, Zayed al-Khayareen,and the Qatari foreign minister Sheikh Mohammed al-Thani have been acceptedby Qatari officials as genuine, but “edited very selectively”, according toa report by BBC link.

In the messages, an amount seeming in excess of $1 billion was quoted asthe money needed to free the hostages.

Voice and text messages were originally leaked to the *Washington Post*linkinApril of this year. Qatar’s government is claiming that they paid the moneyto the Iraqi state and no terrorists received the cash.

Qatari officials maintain the money was given for the economic developmentand security development of Iraq’s government, not to the ransomers. Theyclaim that the money remains in a vault in Iraq’s central bank and “ondeposit”.

A few months after the money was paid and the crisis resolved, the Arabblockade of Qatar began.