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Iraqi Tribunal to charge Saddam and 11 aides
An Iraqi tribunal will charge Saddam Hussein and 11 senior associates with crimes against humanity on Thursday, months ahead of a trial that could help Iraq come to terms with 35 years of Baathist brutality.
The proceedings, likely to take place near Baghdad international airport, where the deposed leader and his top lieutenants have been held, will be televised, but not live.
The U.S. military, which had held Saddam and his former aides as prisoners of war, handed them over to Iraqi legal custody on Wednesday, but will continue to guard them.
Saddam, accused of ordering the killing and torture of thousands of people during 35 years of Baathist rule, was captured by U.S. forces in December near his hometown of Tikrit after eight months on the run following his April 9 overthrow.
Saddam will be charged with crimes against humanity for a 1988 gas massacre of Kurds, the 1990 invasion of Kuwait and the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, according to Salem Chalabi, a U.S.-trained lawyer who has led the work of the special tribunal set up to try the former president and other top Baathists.
Kuwait has called for Saddam to be sentenced to death over Baghdad's seven-month occupation of the Gulf state in 1990-91.
Many Iraqis want Saddam to be executed, though some say they would prefer him to suffer a more protracted punishment.
"There must be a way to really make him suffer," said Kati Hamadi, a mother of three who lost her husband and brother to Saddam's henchmen in the 1980s and 1990s.
"Having an Iraqi trial is an excellent idea. It will expose his murderous past and let Iraqis know all the things he has to answer for -- Iraqis need to hear that," she said.
"But the problem is I don't think he'll get the death penalty because somehow the Baathists will defend him."
Iraq's interim government is considering restoring the death penalty, suspended during the U.S.-British occupation.
FIGHTING INSURGENCY
The government, led by Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, wants to show Iraqis the occupation is really over, despite the presence of U.S.-led foreign troops, and to prove it can curb violence.
A roadside bomb blew up as a U.S. convoy drove past in Baghdad on Thursday, killing two Iraqi bystanders and seriously wounding a third, U.S. soldiers at the scene said.
Blood trickled into the gutter by the side of the road. An ambulance ferried the wounded Iraqi, a woman, to hospital.
On Wednesday night, U.S. forces destroyed what they said was a safe house used by a group led by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the rebellious city of Falluja.
Witnesses said the air strike, the fourth such attack on suspected Zarqawi safe houses in Falluja in two weeks, wrecked the house in a southeastern district and killed four people.
There was no indication that Zarqawi, who has claimed responsibility for several suicide bombings and the beheadings of an American and a South Korean hostage, was in the building. Witnesses on the eastern edge of Falluja said mortar and small-arms clashes had broken out between U.S. forces and insurgents, but there were no reports of casualties. A U.S. military statement said "whenever and wherever we find elements of the Zarqawi network we will attack them." Iraq's new government will have to rely on a U.S.-led multinational force of 160,000 troops until its own security forces are capable of quelling insurgents and foreign militants. The U.S. Army plans to summon a new group of about 4,000 reserve soldiers for duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, taking the total number of additional call-ups announced this week to nearly 10,000, officials said on Wednesday. The Army is striving to find enough soldiers to cope with the conflicts in Iraq, where the United States has about 140,000 troops, and Afghanistan, where it has 20,000.
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