Private guards aid Iraqi minister
Published 9:00 pm Monday, December 18, 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq – Private guards in SUVs helped Iraq’s former electricity minister escape from a police station just outside the heavily fortified Green Zone where the dual U.S.-Iraqi citizen was being held on corruption charges, officials said Monday.
Ayham al-Samaraie, who had escaped once before after being convicted in October – a judge recently threw out that conviction- walked out of the detention facility Sunday with private security experts who once protected him, said Faris Kareem, deputy head of Iraq’s Public Integrity Commission.
Some anticorruption officials described the security guards as American.
In Baghdad, prosecutors charging former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein with genocide presented potentially damning documents Monday in his trial showing his government used banned chemical weapons in a late-1980s counterinsurgency operation against rebellious Iraqi Kurds.
The documents, if authentic, suggest that Hussein’s office was kept regularly informed on the effects and characteristics of chemical weapons and approved their use in an operation in which tens of thousands of Kurds perished.
The targets “lie in lowlands,” said a March 25, 1987, letter by former military intelligence director Saber Douri, and would be suitable for using chemical sarin and mustard gas weapons because the poisons would spread out and stay a long time.
An earlier letter indicated that Hussein’s government delayed a chemical attack until the snows thawed when they would be more effective. So Douri suggested delaying the strike until June.
“Your suggestions have been approved,” Hussein’s office wrote back the next day.
A June 11, 1987, memo said a chemical weapons strike six days earlier in Dohuk province had been successful, killing 31 people and wounding 100.
In other developments Monday:
