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Iraq to step up security for Saddam trial
(AP)
Updated: 2005-10-22 17:50
Iraq's interim government said Saturday it will step up security for defense
lawyers in Saddam Hussein's trial, after one was abducted and killed by gunmen
disguised as security forces.
The body of the Sunni Arab defense lawyer, Saadoun Sughaiyer al-Janabi, was
found dumped on a street in Baghdad Friday just hours after gunmen dragged him
out of his office. He had been shot twice in the head.
Shaken by their colleague's death, the 12 other defense lawyers demanded the
government provide them protection.
"We have decided to take some measures to protect the lawyers," Gen. Hussein
Ali Kamal, a deputy minister in the Interior Ministry, said Saturday. "We cannot
give any details regarding those measures for security reasons," Kamal told The
Associated Press.
Kamal and other government officials met until late Friday night to consider
the attorneys' demands.
Iraqis place the coffin of Saadoun Sughaiyer
al-Janabi, a defense lawyer in Saddam Hussein's mass murder trial, on a
vehicle outside a morgue in Baghdad, Iraq, Friday, Oct. 21, 2005.
[AP] | Saddam and his seven co-defendants face possible death sentences if convicted
on charges of murder and torture for the 1982 massacre of 148 Shiites in the
town of Dujail north of Baghdad. The defendants have pleaded innocent. After the
opening day of their trial on Wednesday, it was adjourned until Nov. 28.
Meanwhile, Iraqis were still waiting to know the outcome of the country's
Oct. 15 constitutional referendum, and they likely will not learn the final
results until next week.
Initial returns indicated the charter passed, prompting Sunni Arabs opposing
it to level accusations of fraud. Electoral officials are auditing unusually
high "yes" votes in some areas to ensure there were no irregularities.
"We are still awaiting the results of the audit from the provinces which we
have selected randomly," Farid Ayar, a senior member of the Independent
Electoral Commission of Iraq, said in an interview on Saturday. He refused to
identify the provinces involved to protect the security of the commission and
United Nations officials working there.
The commission announced referendum turnout figures Friday, saying 9,775,000
Iraqis cast ballots — or 63 percent of registered voters. That was higher than
January's parliament elections, in which 60 percent of Iraqis participated,
including fewer Sunni Arabs.
Also, the secretary general of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, was expected to
leave Iraq on Saturday after a three-day visit aimed at organizing a
reconciliation conference among Iraq's sharply divided Shiites, Kurds and Sunni
Arabs.
Moussa, who was making his first visit to Iraq since Saddam's fall, has
strongly condemned insurgent violence in Iraq in an effort to overcome Shiite
and Kurdish suspicion of the pan-Arab body.
Still, Iraqi leaders did not commit to a reconciliation conference that
Moussa is trying to organize, the first major intervention by the Arab League in
the country's relentless bloodshed.
Shiite and Kurdish leaders complain the league has taken too long to seek a
role, resent its past support for Saddam and suspect the body is biased toward
Iraq's Sunni Arab minority.
In the latest attack, a roadside bomb targeting a police patrol exploded
Saturday in southern Baghdad, killing one policeman, said police 1st Lt. Thaeir
Mahmud.
On Friday, the U.S. military announced the deaths of four more service
members, edging the total number of American military fatalities near 2,000
since the start of the Iraq war.
The lawyers also demanded the government move the trial outside Iraq, said
Khamees Hamid al-Ubaidi, one of Saddam's two lawyers.
That was unlikely, as the government has fiercely rejected any international
venue, insisting Saddam should be tried by Iraqis in Iraq. And Gen. Kamal, the
Interior Ministry official, said Saturday that there has been no change in that
position.
Heavy security already had been provided for the trial prosecutors and
judges, who were considered likely targets of insurgents. Their names have not
been revealed and their faces were not shown in the broadcast of Wednesday's
opening session — with the exception of the presiding judge and the top
prosecutor, whose identities were revealed for the first time.
But before Saturday's announcement by Kamal no security measures had been
extended to the defense lawyers. Their identities have been known, although most
of them have not been prominently discussed in the Iraqi media.
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