Hussein’s nephew escapes from jail
Published 9:00 pm Saturday, December 9, 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq – A nephew of Saddam Hussein serving a life sentence for financing insurgents and possessing bombs escaped from prison Saturday in northern Iraq with the help of a police officer, authorities said.
Sectarian attacks killed at least 20 people, including five who died in a suicide car bombing outside a Shiite shrine in Karbala, police said. Officers also found 39 bullet-riddled bodies in Baghdad that apparently were victims of revenge killings by Sunni Arabs and Shiites.
The escape by Hussein’s nephew underlined one of the problems facing the U.S. military as it tries to train enough Iraqi security personnel so U.S. troops can go home: the ability of Sunni Arab insurgents and Shiite militiamen to infiltrate Iraqi police forces.
Ayman Sabawi, son of Hussein’s half brother Sabawi Ibrahim Hassan al-Tikriti, escaped from a prison 45 miles west of the northern city of Mosul in the afternoon with the help of a policeman, said a local police commander, Brig. Abdul Karim al-Jubouri.
Sabawi, who was arrested in May 2005 by U.S. and Iraqi forces near Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit, 80 miles north of Baghdad, was convicted of illegally crossing the border from Syria and sentenced to 15 years in prison late last year by an Iraqi court. He was sentenced to life in prison in an earlier case for possession of illegal weapons and manufacture of bombs.
He “played a particularly active role in sustaining the terrorism by providing financial support, weapons and explosives to terrorist groups,” Iraq’s government said.
The suicide bomb attack occurred near the Al-Abbas shrine in Karbala, a Shiite holy city 50 miles south of Baghdad.
The shrine’s golden dome and minarets didn’t appear damaged in video shown on Iraqi state TV, but the blast set many parked cars on fire in a nearby street. Two men with bloody faces could be seen running through heavy black smoke past the body of another victim.
A main goal of Sunni Arab insurgent groups such as al-Qaida in Iraq has been to spark sectarian violence by attacking sites revered by the country’s Shiite majority.
In Baghdad, some of the worst violence was in a Sunni pocket of Hurriyah, a mixed neighborhood. Witnesses said Shiite militiamen entered the area after Sunnis warned the few Shiites living there to leave or be killed. Heavy machine gun fire was heard and three columns of black smoke rose into the sky, the witnesses said.
Mohamed al-Askeri, a Defense Ministry spokesman, said some people were chased from their homes, but Iraqi security forces drove off the attackers, handed out food to displaced people and persuaded most to return to their homes. But “others are still frightened,” he said.
The U.S. military, meanwhile, announced that two Marines were killed in combat in Anbar province, raising to 42 the number of U.S. troops who have died in Iraq this month. At least 2,930 have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003.
