Saddam Lawyer Is Kidnapped in Iraq

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The New York Sun

BAGHDAD, Iraq – The trial of Saddam Hussein took startling turns yesterday when prosecutors said the first witness would be a bedridden cancer patient who helped run Iraq’s feared intelligence agency. In the first setback, a lawyer for one of the dictator’s co-defendants was kidnapped.


Iraq’s premier, meanwhile, said he was proud the court gave Saddam – whom he called “one of the world’s most hardened criminals” – so much freedom to talk at Wednesday’s opening session. A defiant Saddam refused to answer the chief judge’s questions and said he did not recognize the legitimacy of the proceedings because he was still president.


Also yesterday, the American military announced the deaths of five service members, including three killed Wednesday by a roadside bomb near Balad, north of Baghdad, and another by a suicide car bomb near the Syrian border. A fifth soldier died from a nonhostile gunshot, the military said.


At least 1,988 members of the American military have died since the war started in 2003, according to an Associated Press count.


Violence in and around Baghdad killed at least 15 Iraqi civilians and police. In one attack, a rocket hit a Baghdad public school for students aged 12-15, killing a student and a nearby shopkeeper and wounding five students.


At the hospital, an injured girl writhed in pain, her head bandaged and her white shirt and blue overalls stained with blood.


Several schools have been attacked recently. On October 9, masked gunmen in police commando uniforms burst into a school in Samarra, north of Baghdad, pulled a Shiite teacher out of the classroom and shot him dead in the hallway.


Last month, insurgents killed four Shiite teachers in an empty classroom as school let out.


The U.S. military said raids in western Iraq last weekend killed at least 12 insurgents, including Saad al-Dulaimi, a senior militant in the Al Qaeda in Iraq organization blamed for numerous attacks on foreigners and Iraqis.


The prosecution of Saddam and seven of his regime’s henchmen in a mass murder case could be a lengthy process. It is the first of up to a dozen that prosecutors plan to bring to trial against Saddam and his Baath Party inner circle for atrocities during their 23-year rule.


Wednesday’s opening session saw the 68-year-old former president proclaim his innocence to charges of murder, torture, forced expulsion and illegal imprisonment stemming from a 1982 massacre of 148 Shiites in Dujail, a mainly Shiite town north of Baghdad, following a failed attempt on Saddam’s life. The former dictator and his co-defendants could be sentenced to death if convicted.


The trial will resume November 28, but the court will interview a key witness Sunday because of his poor health. Wadah Ismail al-Sheik, director of the investigation department at Saddam’s Mukhabarat intelligence agency at the time of the Dujail massacre, will give his testimony in a hospital Sunday, court officials said on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. They declined to say which hospital.


America says the agency is the same one that tried to assassinate former President Bush in Kuwait in 1993.


Prosecutors said Mr. al-Sheik played an important role in the events at Dujail. If he recovers, they said, he may be a defendant in a separate, related case. The officials did not give details on the other case and did not specify Mr. al-Sheik’s age.


In another trial development, 10 masked gunmen kidnapped the lawyer for one of Saddam’s co-defendants, police said. Saadoun Sughaiyer al-Janabi, who was in the courtroom Wednesday, is one of two lawyers representing Awad Hamed al-Bandar, one of the seven Baath Party officials also being tried.


The New York Sun

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