Baghdad, Iraq – The trial of Saddam Hussein took startling turns Thursday when prosecutors said the first witness would be a bedridden cancer patient who helped run Iraq’s feared intelligence agency.
In the first setback, a lawyer for one of the dictator’s co-defendants was kidnapped.
Iraq’s premier, meanwhile, said he was proud the court gave Hussein – whom he called “one of the world’s most hardened criminals” – so much freedom to talk at Wednesday’s opening session. A defiant Hussein refused to answer the chief judge’s questions Wednesday and said he did not recognize the legitimacy of the proceedings because he was still president.
In another trial development, 10 masked gunmen kidnapped the lawyer for one of Hussein’s co-defendants, police said. Saadoun Sughaiyer al-Janabi, who was in the courtroom Wednesday, is one of two lawyers representing Awad Hamed al-Bandar, one of the seven Baath Party officials also being tried.
Also Thursday, the U.S. military announced the deaths of five service members, including three killed Wednesday by a roadside bomb near Balad, north of Baghdad, and another by a suicide car bomb near the Syrian border. A fifth soldier died from a nonhostile gunshot, the military said.
Violence in and around Baghdad killed at least 15 Iraqi civilians and police. In one attack, a rocket hit a Baghdad public school for students 12 to 15 years old, killing a student and a nearby shopkeeper and wounding five students.
The U.S. military said raids in western Iraq last weekend killed at least 12 insurgents, including Saad al-Dulaimi, a senior militant in the al-Qaeda in Iraq organization blamed for numerous attacks on foreigners and Iraqis.
Hussein’s trial will resume Nov. 28, but the court will interview a key witness Sunday because of his poor health.
Wadah Ismail al-Sheik, director of the investigation department at Hussein’s Mukhabarat intelligence agency at the time of a 1982 massacre of Shiites in Dujayl, the focus of the trial, will give his testimony in a hospital, court officials said. They declined to say which hospital.
The United States says the agency is the same one that tried to assassinate former President Bush in Kuwait in 1993.
