BAGHDAD, Iraq – Iraqi police arrested eight Sunni Arabs for allegedly plotting to kill the judge who prepared the indictment of Saddam Hussein, authorities said Sunday, the day before the ousted leader’s trial for crimes against humanity resumes.
Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark arrived in Baghdad to help the defense but might not be allowed in court today when the first of up to 35 prosecution witnesses take the stand because he has not been officially recognized by the court as legal counsel.
Tight security surrounds the proceedings, which are restarting after a five-week recess in a specially built courtroom in the heavily guarded Green Zone. The precise starting time was not announced due to fear of attack by both Hussein’s supporters and opponents.
The eight alleged plotters from Iraq’s Sunni Arab minority were apprehended Saturday in the northern city of Kirkuk, police Col. Anwar Qadir said.
He said they were carrying written instructions from a former top Hussein deputy, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, ordering them to kill investigating judge Raed Juhi, who prepared the case against Hussein and forwarded it to the trial court in July.
Al-Douri is the highest ranking member of the Hussein regime still at large.
Hussein and seven co-defendants are charged in the killing of more than 140 Shiite Muslims after an assassination attempt against the former president in the Shiite town of Dujail in 1982. Convictions could bring a sentence of death by hanging.
In Canada, a Parliament official said four aid workers, including two Canadians, had been kidnapped in Iraq but refused to name their group or say where they were seized. Britain’s Foreign Office identified one of the four as Norman Kember, a Briton, but provided no further details.
Elizabeth Colton, a U.S. Embassy spokeswoman, said the United States was investigating whether an American also was among the missing.
The U.S. military reported that a Marine assigned to the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing was killed Saturday when his vehicle struck a roadside bomb near Camp Taqaddum, 45 miles west of Baghdad. At least 2,106 U.S. military personnel have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
Also Saturday, a military vehicle carrying three congressmen overturned on the way to the Baghdad airport, injuring two of them, the U.S. Embassy said Sunday.
Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa., was airlifted to a military hospital in Germany for an MRI on his neck, and Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., was sent to a Baghdad hospital for evaluation, said Rep. Jim Marshall, D-Ga., who was also in the vehicle but was not hurt when it overturned.
Murphy is “bumped and bruised, but in good spirits,” his chief of staff, Susan Mosychuck, said Sunday. He will return home from Germany as soon as he is cleared by doctors, she said. Skelton spokeswoman Lara Battles said she believed Skelton was also doing well.
In Baghdad, Iraq’s former interim prime minister complained Sunday that human rights abuses by some in the new government are as bad now as they were under Hussein.
Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite Muslim, told the London newspaper The Observer that fellow Shiites are responsible for death squads and secret torture centers and said brutality by elements of Iraqi security forces rivals that of Hussein’s secret police.
“People are remembering the days of Saddam. These were the precise reasons that we fought Saddam and now we are seeing the same thing,” the newspaper quoted Allawi as saying.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
