Saddam Trial 'Within Two Months'

Saddam trial 'within two months'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story...496209,00.html

Staff and agencies
Tuesday May 31, 2005

Iraq's new president, Jalal Talabani, said today that he hoped the country's toppled dictator Saddam Hussein could go on trial within the next two months.

In an interview broadcast by CNN, Mr Talabani said: "The Iraqi government is now doing its best to prepare the ground for a court ... to decide ... Saddam Hussein's future."

Leading Iraqi politicians have said several times recently that the trial could start within months, while Iraqi prosecutors and US officials have said that it is more likely to start next year.

Prosecutors are understood to be keen to try several of Saddam's lieutenants first to help build the case against the former president, who was deposed after a US-led invasion in March 2003.

Saddam, who became president in 1979, was found by US forces in December 2003 in a hole with a hidden entrance and ventilation system. The hideout was in a town outside his home city of Tikrit in the north of the country.

Currently held at a secret location in Iraq, Saddam faces a trial on charges including genocide and crimes against humanity. Analysts believe it is likely that he will face the death penalty.

US officials have promised that Saddam will get a fair trial, however Iraqi leaders have not appeared so neutral.

Today, Mr Talabani, a Kurdish leader, said Saddam was a war criminal who had committed crimes against Iraqi people in Kurdistan, Baghdad and Shia areas of southern Iraq.

He said he would await the outcome of the trial but said "the Iraqi people from now are starting to ask for executing Saddam Hussein and for sentencing him for death".

Mr Talabani also said that it was possible stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons could still be found in Iraq. Finding weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was a prime reason cited by US and British leaders for invading Iraq, but no significant WMD have even been found.

Most officials in charge of searching for WMD in Iraq have concluded that Saddam either destroyed his stockpiles years before 2003, or moved them to another country.

Meanwhile, four American and four Italian military personnel were killed today in separate aircraft crashes in Iraq, military officials said.

The governor of western Iraq's volatile Anbar province was also killed during clashes between US forces and the insurgents who abducted him, the Iraqi government and US military said.

Government spokesman Laith Kuba said Raja Nawaf Farhan al-Mahalawi, who was abducted on May 10, was killed by rubble that fell when the house where he was held became the scene of a battle between US forces and foreign fighters.

In other violence today, a suicide car bomber killed two Iraqi soldiers in an early morning attack on an army checkpoint near Buhriz, about 35 miles north of Baghdad.

The US vice president, Dick Cheney, said last night that he predicted fighting would end in Iraq by 2009, before the Bush administration leaves office.

Mr Cheney told Larry King Live on CNN: "I think we may well have some kind of presence there over a period of time ... the level of activity that we see today from a military standpoint, I think, will clearly decline. I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency."