Days after the dramatic escape of the dismissed CEO of "Nissan Motor" Carlos Ghosn from his residence in Japan to Lebanon, some strings of the process and who was behind it began to unfold.
The French newspaper "Le Parisien" revealed - quoting Turkish and American media sources - that "two foreigners" were accompanied by a branch of a private plane that fled him inside a bag to transport musical instruments from Osaka, Japan, to Istanbul, and then to the Lebanese capital, Beirut.
Turkish Minister of Justice Abdul Hamid Gul - in a statement to CNN Turk - said that "two foreigners were involved in the Ghosn smuggling operation" from Japan, and media sources confirmed that they are two men specialized in cross-border security operations.
"The Parisian" quoted American media sources as saying that the two American men, Michael Taylor and George Antoine Zayek, were the only officially passengers in the plane that took off from Kansai International Airport near Osaka, Japan, to Istanbul airport, on Sunday night, last December 29, It is the same plane that flew a branch.
Zayek comes from a Christian Maronite family, meaning that he is Lebanese, and his security and intelligence experience enabled him to work for Michael Taylor.
Taylor is a well-known figure in American security circles. He was born in 1960 in New York to a family with military traditions and worked four years in the US Special Forces.
After the Israeli military intervention in Lebanon in 1982, Taylor was sent to Beirut as a trainer for the Lebanese Special Forces, where he met his wife, Lamia, whom he married after three years and had three children.
During the first Gulf War in 1991, Taylor was a stand-by soldier, and he was not called in because he was assigned a covert operation to dismantle a hashish smuggling gang in the Lebanese Bekaa Valley.
Taylor took advantage of his long security experience to set up in 1994 a private security company called "American International Security Corporation" (AISC), cooperating with US security services, and signed contracts with major companies, such as "Delta Airlines" and "ABC".
This security company is carrying out rescue operations in dangerous areas, one of which was revealed by the "New York Times" in 2008, where Taylor proposed going on a secret operation to Afghanistan to rescue the two Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, David Rudd, who was held hostage by the Taliban. But Rudd escapes before Taylor and his aides arrive.
In September 2012, Taylor was arrested in the US state of Utah and held for 12 months for using information he obtained from a former US soldier to win a $ 900,000 contract that would allow him to provide training courses for Afghan special forces. This contract has been expanded and renewed several times until the total income of his company amounted to $ 54 million.
Taylor initially pleaded not guilty, and after spending 12 months in prison, he signed an agreement recognizing that he had paid bribes for the contract. After he was released from prison in November 2013, his company was dissolved, but he continued to work within another security company, the International Security Support Group (ISAG).
As for George Antoine Zayek, he also worked for Taylor-owned "American International Security Company" in Afghanistan between 2009 and 2012, and then for "International Security Support Group".
Some sources present Zaek as a "security director" stationed in Beirut, but he also works in countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Egypt, and Nigeria.
Speaking fluently in Arabic, French, English and Italian, Zayek is proud of the contribution of his "great experience" to the success of the US security strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq, and also supervised between 2012 and 2015 the security of a "large international construction company" in Najaf.