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BAGHDAD: The trial begins in Iraq on Tuesday of Tareq
Aziz, former deputy premier and the international face of the Saddam
Hussein regime, on charges related to the execution of 42 Baghdad
merchants in 1992.
It is the fourth trial of former
regime officials by the Iraqi High Tribunal (IHT), the court set up
to try high-ranking officials under Saddam.
Judge Muneer Haddad from the IHT
confirmed to Agence France-Presse that the trial will begin on
Tuesday.
Tareq Aziz and seven others,
including “Chemical” Ali Hasan al-Majid, are accused of
executing the Baghdad businessmen after blaming them for hiking food
prices when Iraq was under UN sanctions.
Prosecutors say the victims were
arrested in Baghdad’s wholesale markets and executed after a
speedy trial in 1992. They also allege that the former regime then
seized their money and property.
According to his son, Tareq Aziz
is innocent of the charges against him.
Ziad Aziz also described the
charges against his father as “weak” and aimed at “preventing
him from taking advantage of the amnesty law which states that
anyone held for a year without being referred to court must be
released.”
“My father has been in prison
for five years… without being charged, tried or investigated,”
he said.
Aziz and Majid, who is already on
death row after being convicted of genocide for overseeing the
killings of Kurdish villagers in 1988, are the two most high profile
defendants in the new trial.
The other six are Watban Ibrahim
al-Hassan, half-brother of Saddam and former interior minister;
Sabbawi Ibrahim al-Hassan, chief of public security from 1991 to
1995; Mizban Khudier Hadi, a member of the former Revolutionary
Command Council; Saddam’s secretary Abid Hamid Mahmud; Ahmed
Hussein Khudier, a former finance minister; and ex-governor of the
central bank Essam Rasheed Khuwaish.
The trial of Aziz, who
surrendered to US forces in April 2003, will be presided over by
Kurdish judge Rauf Rasheed Abdel Rahman, who sentenced Saddam to
death in 2006 for his role in the killing of 148 Shiites in the town
of Dujail after an assassination attempt against him in 1982.
Saddam was hanged on December 30,
2006. His cohorts Taha Yassin Ramadan, Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti and
Awad Ahmed al-Bandar met the same fate after being convicted over
the Dujail killings.
Majid and two other former regime
officials are on death row for the Kurdish killings during the
so-called Anfal campaign in the final year of the eight-year
Iraq-Iran war.
Majid is also on trial for his
role in crushing the 1991 Shiite uprising that followed the first
Gulf War, the third trial being conducted by the IHT.
On Thursday, Aziz’s lawyer
Badie Aref told Agence France-Presse in Amman that the defense team
will attend the trial “if the security situation is suitable.”
The urbane cigar-smoking Aziz,
with his mastery of English, put a cultured gloss on Saddam’s
regime in its dealings with the West.
At one of last year’s hearings
during the Anfal trial, Aziz praised Saddam defiantly when he was
called as a witness.
“I had the honor to work with
the former regime and with the hero Saddam Hussein,” he said from
the stand.
“He is the hero behind the
unity of Iraq and its sovereignty. This is an honor to me,” Aziz
added, much to the distress of the judge and prosecutors.
--AFP
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