BAGHDAD, Iraq – Saddam Hussein’s trial was set to resume under a new chief judge today after the first presiding judge resigned and his initial replacement was accused of having belonged to the deposed dictator’s Baath Party.
One of Hussein’s lawyers said the defense team would use the turnover in the trial panel’s leadership to accuse Iraqi and U.S. officials of interference and to seek a new delay of the proceedings, which have been in recess for the past month.
The Iraqi High Tribunal on Monday named Raouf Rasheed Abdel Rahman, a 64-year-old Kurd, to take temporary charge of the five-judge panel. The decision was announced after Judge Rizgar Mohammed Amin, the tribunal’s original judge and most public face, resisted several appeals by his colleagues and Iraqi leaders to return to the courtroom.
“Everybody is trying to influence my decision, but it is final,” Amin told Reuters news agency Monday.
The chief judge resigned Jan. 9, complaining of government pressure to speed up the trial and clamp down on lengthy outbursts by Hussein and some of the seven other defendants.
Amin’s deputy on the trial panel, Said Hammashi, was chosen by fellow panel members to take over. The tribunal backed down, however, after a government commission set up to purge former Baath Party members from public office objected.
Hammashi denied the commission’s accusation, made in a letter to the court last week, that he had been party member. But Jafar Moussawi, the tribunal’s chief prosecutor, said the court decided to pass over Hammashi to avoid further controversy.
Rahman has been serving in a different chamber of the tribunal. His appointment to lead the trial is temporary because Amin’s resignation has not yet been formally accepted.
Also Monday, gunmen wearing uniforms of a Shiite-led security force swept into a Sunni Arab neighborhood in central Baghdad before dawn, killing three men and speeding away with more than 20 others, police and witnesses said. Three were later freed in eastern Baghdad, but the rest remained unaccounted for, witnesses said.
The pre-dawn raid in the predominantly Sunni Arab of Toubji threatens to inflame sectarian tensions as leaders of Iraq’s religious and ethnic communities prepare for talks on a unity government to include Sunni Arabs, the heart of the insurgency.
Sunni Arabs have long complained of abuse by Shiite militias and security services and have demanded that those responsible be punished.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military said seven more U.S. troops had been killed – a soldier in a roadside bombing in Baghdad on Monday, two Air Force members in a blast near Taji north of the capital late Sunday, and four soldiers in a roadside bombing near the northern town of Hawijah on Friday.
There was no word on the fate of kidnapped American journalist Jill Carroll. Iraqi officials said joint U.S.-Iraqi operations were carried out recently to free her, but they provided no details.
Bodies of eight Sunni Arabs were found in a field north of Baghdad on Monday, five days after they were seized on their way home by bus after being rejected for admission to the police academy in the capital.
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