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Walkout at Saddam trial, Baghdad bombs kill 32

Posted on: Tuesday, 28 February 2006, 06:28 CST

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)

Source: REUTERS

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