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Iraq Moves Ahead With Trial for Saddam Halt is Ruled Out, Despite Killing of 2nd Defense Lawyer

Posted on: Thursday, 10 November 2005, 12:00 CST

By John F. Burns

Iraqi officials said Wednesday that they were pressing ahead with plans to resume the trial of Saddam Hussein later this month despite a drive-by shooting that killed one of the leading defense lawyers in the trial and seriously wounded another.

Less than 24 hours after the killing, court officials outlined plans for improved television coverage of the trial when it resumes on Nov. 28. One official, speaking on condition that he not be named, said the plans called for the court to sit for three days before an adjournment that would last until the end of January. He said longer term plans called for the court to continue its work for at least two more years, conducting up to a dozen trials for the mass killings committed during Saddam's rule.

Coming on top of an attack last month in which another defense lawyer was abducted and killed, the attack on Tuesday brought immediate demands from other defense attorneys in the case for the trial to be halted and moved to a location outside Iraq. Iraqi officials, and American justice department lawyers who have helped guide the court's work, have strongly opposed any move, describing the defense lawyers' move as a bid to spare Hussein from having to account for the brutal repression he brought to Iraq during his 24 years in power. An Interior Ministry official said the drive-by shooting in a western suburb of Baghdad had killed one of two lawyers who represented Taha Yassin Ramadan, a former vice president under Saddam, and Barzan al-Tikriti, Saddam's half-brother and former head of the secret police. Both men are defendants with Saddam in the first trial to be held for the mass killings under his rule.

The trial opened briefly in Baghdad three weeks ago and quickly adjourned. It is set to resume Nov. 28.

The Interior Ministry account said three or four gunmen in a red Opel sedan attacked the lawyers' car with automatic rifles as they drove in late morning through the suburb of Adel, a district about 6 kilometers, or 4 miles, west of the Tigris River.

One of the lawyers, Adel Muhammad al-Zubaidi, about 60, died instantly. The other, Thamir Mahmoud al-Khuzaie, in his early 40s, survived, and was taken to an American military hospital near the airport, according to another member of the defense team.

The killings compounded a sense that the tribunal is trapped in a crisis that may be hard to resolve.

With 2 of the 13 defense lawyers who appeared at the court's opening session slain, and a third badly wounded, the others seemed determined to shun the court.

The Iraqi Bar Association, saying it spoke for the defense lawyers, said it would uphold a boycott of the trial it announced after the first killing. Two lawyers representing Saddam said they would demand that the trial be annulled.

Iraqi court officials said the defense lawyers had rebuffed an offer of round-the-clock protection by Interior Ministry bodyguards after the killing of the first defense lawyer on Oct. 20.

The chief prosecutor, Jaafar al-Mousawi, said in a telephone interview that the defense lawyers had refused to take telephone calls from court officials, and that the bar association had also rejected the offers.

The killings Tuesday brought the total number of people slain in connection with the court to eight, according to a tally given by officials at the Iraqi High Tribunal, the name given to the court trying Saddam when it was reconstituted under a new Iraqi statute last month.

The total includes the first defense lawyer killed, Sadoun al- Janabi, who died less than 36 hours after the trial's opening session. He was the chief lawyer for Awad al-Bandar, the chief judge of Saddam's revolutionary court.

The dead also include one of the court's judges, shot in his driveway with his son this year; the brother Mousawi, working as a driver for the court when he was killed; and three other court officials.

At least a dozen of the court's judges and prosecutors have been given bodyguards, and some travel in armored cars. Some have been housed, with their families, in the heavily protected "green zone" that is the base for the Iraqi government and high-ranking U.S. officials.

The trial of Saddam and seven co-defendants, the first of several the former Iraqi ruler is expected to face for mass killings under his rule, adjourned only three hours after it opened on Oct. 19.

The prosecution alleges that Saddam led the others in the premeditated killing of 148 men and teenage boys from the Shiite town of Dujail, north of Baghdad, after an assassination attempt there on Saddam in July 1982. It says 46 of the victims were tortured to death more than a year before the revolutionary court condemned all 148 victims to death.

Saddam's chief lawyer, Khalil al-Dulaimi, said in a telephone interview that the surviving defense lawyers were preparing a new statement rejecting the reconvening of the court and declaring it illegal.

Dulaimi again rejected the court's proposal that lawyers be given bodyguards, and dismissed a suggestion he said the court had made for the lawyers to take part in the trial sessions by teleconferences from their offices or homes. "That's just ridiculous," he said.

Another lawyer for Saddam, Khamis al-Obeidi, was similarly uncompromising. "We think that it's impossible to hold a trial in Baghdad in these security conditions, and that the court should be transferred to a location outside Iraq," he said.

That proposal has been repeatedly rejected by Iraqi officials, and by U.S. Justice Department lawyers who advise them, who have said holding the trial in Iraq is a test of Iraq's sovereignty and of progress toward responsible government after the horrors of the Saddam era.

In any case, the attack Tuesday seemed certain to deepen the suspicions that have bedeviled the tribunal since it was established 20 months ago by an American decree. Dulaimi, Saddam's lawyer, said Khuzaie, the lawyer who survived Tuesday's attack, had told him that a police car had shadowed the ambush, and had taken both lawyers to a hospital.

Interior Ministry officials said they had no knowledge of any police car having witnessed the ambush, but Dulaimi's account seemed likely to foster a growing conspiracy theory among the many Sunni Arabs still loyal to Saddam.

The theory holds that the Shiite-dominated transitional government has sponsored police death squads operating out of the Interior Ministry that attack loyalists of the ousted government.

Source: International Herald Tribune

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