PARIS, 28 March 2004 — A French lawyer with a reputation for defending terrorists and a Nazi leader said yesterday he had been asked to defend Saddam Hussein.
Jacques Verges told France-Inter radio he had received a letter from Saddam’s family confirming his role as attorney for the former Iraqi leader.
“I was ready to defend him and then I received a letter from his nephew,” Verges said, and read aloud a portion of the correspondence.
The letter read: “In my capacity as nephew of President Saddam Hussein, I commission you officially by this letter to assure the defense of my uncle,” Verges said. He did not name the person who sent the letter.
US officials have said they plan to bring Saddam to trial for alleged crimes against Iraqi people, but the location of any trial and its format and date have yet to be decided.
Saddam is being held by US forces at an undisclosed location.
Verges said he feared for Saddam’s safety. “My concern is not the trial,” the lawyer said. “My concern is they’ll kill him before.”
Verges has defended Venezuelan terrorist Carlos the Jackal, confessed serial killer Charles Sobhraj and the Nazi Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie.
More recently, Khieu Samphan, a former head of state for the Khmer Rouge, said last month he had picked Verges to defend him at a proposed genocide trial for surviving leaders of the group that ruled Cambodia in the 1970s.
Meanwhile, the BBC reported yesterday that the man who led US forces to Saddam Hussein’s underground hiding place in Iraq was one of the deposed president’s closest bodyguards.
The BBC said it found Mohammed Ibrahim Omar Al-Musslit betrayed Saddam shortly after he himself had been arrested and interrogated in December.
The BBC’s Panorama program quoted US soldiers as saying Musslit, a loyal lieutenant in Saddam’s security organization and Fedayeen militia, would not get the reward because he had not given the information willingly.
Musslit was one of the people in a car with Saddam when he fled Baghdad after the fall of the city last April, the BBC said on its website ahead of tonight’s Panorama broadcast. It said Musslit led troops to their prize hours after being arrested.
