BAGHDAD, 23 May 2005 — Iraqi authorities have released a top official in Saddam Hussein’s former regime because he is apparently terminally ill.
Ghazi Hammud Al-Obeidi, former regional chairman in the southern Iraqi city of Kut for the former ruling Baath party, was the first to be released among detained former regime members who were on the list of 55 most wanted Iraqis.
“Ghazi Obeidi is suffering from cancer and according to my information he has been released for health reasons,” Justice Minister Abdel Hussein Shandal told The Associated Press. “Only for health reasons.”
Shandal did not elaborate but Obeidi’s lawyer, Badee Izzat Aref, said he was released April 28 because he was suffering from what appears to be terminal stomach cancer.
Aref said that he met Obeidi, 65, recently and described his condition as “very bad” and added that he was in a wheel chair.
He also appealed for the release of Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash, known as “Mrs. Anthrax,” because she was suffering from breast cancer. Ammash was one of the two other people featured in pictures published Saturday by the British tabloid The Sun, along with photos showing an imprisoned Saddam, including one where he is clad only in his underwear.
Ammash, a biotech researcher, got her nickname for her alleged work trying to develop biological weapons for Saddam.
Aref represents 10 former regime officials who have been imprisoned.
Obeidi was captured May 7, 2003, nearly four weeks after the fall of Saddam’s regime. He was number 51 on the most-wanted list and was the “two of hearts” in the deck of cards.
Meanwhile, aides of Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr met with a key Sunni group seeking to ease sectarian tensions in the country, while gunmen killed a top trade ministry official. Also yesterday, three Romanian journalists and their Iraqi-American guide who had been held hostage for nearly two months in Iraq were released.
Senior aides of anti-US cleric Sadr met a key Sunni group in a bid to soothe tensions that have flared amid violence that has killed at least 550 people, including 10 Shiite and Sunni clerics, since the new Shiite-dominated government was announced April 28.
“There is a wound that needs to be treated and Moqtada was the first to offer his medicine,” said Sheikh Abdul Salam Al-Kubaisi, spokesman for the Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars after the talks with the Sadr delegation.
The association’s leader, Harith Al-Dhari, last week pinned the killing of several Sunnis, including clerics, on the Badr Brigades, the military wing of Iraq’s largest Shiite party, the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
Brigade General Secretary Hadi Al-Amri has denied the charge and accused the Sunni association of wanting to “push Iraq into a sectarian conflict.”
Sadr said in a television interview aired yesterday the talks were aimed at settling the feud between the association and the Badr Bridges. “Iraq needs to stand side-by-side for the time being,” Sadr told Al-Arabiya TV in reference to fears that extremists within Iraq’s Shiite and Sunni communities were pushing the country toward a civil war.
