Walkout at Saddam trial, Baghdad bombs kill 32

By Salem al-Oreibi and Mussab Al-Khairalla

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Bombs killed at least 32 people in
Baghdad and wrecked the tomb of Saddam Hussein’s father on
Tuesday as the ousted leader was in court for the first time
since days of sectarian violence pitched Iraq toward civil war.

Saddam’s two lead defense counsel walked out within minutes
of the trial restarting after a two-week pause when requests
for a further adjournment and the removal of the chief judge
were rejected. Officials said court-appointed lawyers would
defend Saddam, as they had done since a previous walkout a
month ago.

Saddam ended a hunger strike for “health reasons,” lawyers
said before returning to the trial, which has been troubled by
charges of political bias and killings of two defense
attorneys.

Twenty-three people were killed when a bomb left at a fuel
station in eastern Baghdad blasted people lining up for petrol,
police said. At least nine were killed in two other explosions,
including an apparent car bomb in a busy street across the
Tigris river from the trial in one of Saddam’s former palaces.

More than 80 people were wounded in all, police said, in
the bloodiest attack in the capital in two months.

Two British soldiers were killed in southern Iraq and U.S.
forces reported the death of an American soldier.

A Sunni mosque in Baghdad was earlier damaged by a bomb,
police said, and police found nine bodies near the religiously
mixed city of Baquba, scene of several sectarian attacks since
a suspected al Qaeda bomb destroyed a Shi’ite shrine on
Wednesday.

Activity on Baghdad’s streets had been returning to normal
on the second day since the lifting of a three-day curfew
imposed to try to stem violence that killed more than 200
people. A Saddam-era, Soviet-built Iraqi tank guarded a Sunni
mosque in west Baghdad and Iraqi and U.S. military units were
on patrol.

FATHER’S TOMB

The dome of the shrine Saddam had erected over his father’s
originally modest grave in his Sunni home town of Tikrit was
damaged, local residents said, and windows and doors blown out.
Police and local government officials said explosives planted
at the tomb in the cemetery went off around 6 a.m. (0300 GMT).

The former president, who has ended a hunger strike staged
in protest at trial conditions, is given to making speeches
from the dock. Saddam could well expound on the sectarian
bloodshed that has swept Iraq since the destruction of the
Shi’ites’ Golden Mosque in Samarra.

Saddam has justified some of the oppressive policies of his
Sunni-dominated rule over three decades as necessary to holding
Iraq together amid tensions between the Sunnis and majority
Shi’ite Arabs as well as the ethnic Kurds in the north.

He and seven others are being tried for crimes against
humanity in the killings of 148 Shi’ite villagers in 1982. His
defense team, two of whom were killed after the trial began in
October, accuse the Shi’ite- and Kurdish-led government of
running a political show trial supported by the United States.

SOLDIERS KILLED

A U.S. soldier shot dead west of Baghdad was among more
than 20 people killed on Monday. Local people said a roadside
bomb blasted a British army patrol in the Shi’ite southern city
of Amara on Tuesday. A spokesman said two soldiers were killed.

A duty manager of Baghdad morgue said his unit had received
309 bodies since Wednesday, most of them victims of violence.
Morgue data showed this was double the average — it handled
10,080 bodies in 2005 — but manager Qais Hassan denied a
report that Baghdad morgue had taken in over 1,300 bodies in a
week.

Iraqi and U.S. officials disputed police tallies of more
than 200 killed in the first four days and said on Saturday
only 119 had died across Iraq by then.

U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, closely engaged in
efforts to forge a unity government, told CNN Iraq “came to the
brink of civil war” but said the present “crisis is over.” He
warned, however, that further flare-ups were possible.

The Sunni minority’s main political bloc, however, said it
was not ready to end the boycott of coalition talks which it
announced in protest at reprisals against Sunni mosques.

Still fearful of reprisals, some families on both sides of
Baghdad’s religious divide abandoned homes where they felt
threatened by neighbors — or threw barricades up in streets.

But national leaders and many ordinary Iraqis insisted they
believed in each other’s goodwill. State television broadcast
images of Shi’ites and Sunnis praying together in Baghdad.

Overnight curfews remain in force across Iraq.

Washington hopes for stability to let it start bringing
home 136,000 U.S. troops now caught in the middle and trying to
keep order. It has been pressing Shi’ite leaders to accept
minority Sunnis in a national unity government since the Sunnis
took part in U.S.-backed elections in December for the first
time.

(Additional reporting by Lutfi Abu Oun, Michael Georgy,
Alastair Macdonald and Nick Olivari in Baghdad, Ghazan
al-Jibouri in Tikrit and Faris al-Mehdawi in Baquba)