Property Search
Cars Online
Insurance For Women
Free Insurance Quote
Life Insurance
Online Dating
Flights Online
Play the UK Lottery
Compare quotes. Insure.
Place your Bet!
Flight Centre Specials
Defence calls for Saddam to be freed
Carlos Hamann
Posted Thu, 10 Nov 2005
Lawyers representing Iraqi ex-president Saddam Hussein asked on Wednesday for the court trying him to be scrapped and for Saddam to be freed, after a defence lawyer was murdered on Tuesday in Baghdad.
The defence team appealed to the international community, the UN Security Council and Secretary General Kofi Annan to "declare null and void the Iraqi (Special) Tribunal" in which Saddam and seven former henchmen are being tried.
The statement said the court "has no reason for being and has no judicial or legal basis."
It also called for pressure to "free president Saddam Hussein and (the members of his) legitimate leadership so that they may regain the ability to exercise their constitutional rights."
They had earlier said they would boycott the next hearing in Saddam's trial after a second colleague was murdered, as President Jalal Talabani called on them to accept police protection.
Adel Mohammed Abbas, who represented Saddam co-defendant and former vice president Taha Yassin Ramadan, was killed when gunmen opened fire on him and fellow lawyer Tamer Hammud Hadi in Baghdad on Tuesday.
Hadi, who helps with the defence of Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, a Saddam half-brother who once headed the feared Mukhabarat intelligence service, was wounded and hospitalised.
Abbas's death underlined the volatile climate in Iraq and cast doubt on whether the trial would resume as scheduled on 28 November.
The killing followed the abduction and murder of defence lawyer Saadun Janabi the day after the trial opened in Baghdad on 19 October. He represented Awad Ahmad al-Bandar, a former chief judge of the revolutionary court and deputy head of Saddam's office.
Saddam and his co-defendants face charges connected to the 1982 massacre of 148 Shia villagers from Dujail, north of the capital.
Rejecting earlier suggestions to move the trial abroad, the premier's spokesperson Leith Kubba said defence lawyers had turned down the offer for protection.
Talabani said the aim of the killings was to "affect the normal course of the independent judicial process in Iraq," spokesperson Qamiran Qardaghi said.
"President Talabani urged the relevant security services to assure the protection of lawyers involved in the trial and, at the same time, asked those lawyers to accept that protection."
Meanwhile, a force of 3500 US marines and Iraqi soldiers completed an anti-insurgent sweep of the far western town of Husayba, close to the Syrian border.
"Clearing operations have ended in Husayba," Marine Colonel Stephen Davis said.
About 1000 Iraqi and 2500 US troops launched the operation, dubbed Steel Curtain early on Saturday, focusing on the Euphrates valley town in the restive Sunni Arab province of Al-Anbar.
The sweep was aimed at shattering the network of foreign fighters belonging to al-Qaeda in Iraq active in the region and seal the border area.
At least one US marine, one Iraqi soldier and 36 suspected insurgents were reported killed in the fighting while at least 180 suspected terrorists, including some Africans and Asians, were arrested on Tuesday, the US military said.
On Wednesday, the US military said another marine had died on Tuesday of wounds sustained in Al-Anbar a day earlier, without saying if this was in connection with Steel Curtain.
A rebel chief in the Sunni Arab rebel bastion of Ramadi, west of Baghdad, was arrested during a raid, the US military said.
"Majid Adnan Souedawi, a rebel leader, was captured along with five others during an operation in a house suspected of harbouring insurgents," it said, adding that he was "responsible for several attacks against coalition forces."
A day earlier, al-Qaeda in Iraq, led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, issued an internet statement threatening to retaliate against the sweep with an offensive of its own.
The statement, which could not be verified, stressed the group's "right to defend the (Islamic) nation and avenge the honour and blood" of Iraqis.
In other violence, at least seven Iraqis were killed and 30 were wounded when three car bombs exploded in quick succession outside a police station and an adjacent Shia mosque in northeast Baghdad, an interior ministry official said.
Five Iraqi police officers were killed in a suicide car bomb attack near Baquba, 60 kilometres (35 miles) north of Baghdad, security sources said.
A brother of Iraq's Sunni Arab parliament speaker Hajem al-Hassani was kidnapped on Tuesday along with two of his bodyguards in the ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk, relatives and security sources said on Wednesday.
A professor of medicine was gunned down in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, and an employee of the Sudanese embassy in Iraq, Hammuda Ahmed Adem, was shot dead on Wednesday west of Baghdad, security sources said.
AFP
