BAGHDAD, 20 September 2004 — Interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said yesterday that elections will go ahead as scheduled in January despite widespread violence.
Allawi, who spoke with reporters after a meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair in London, said his government was determined that elections take place on Jan. 31. “We are adamant that democracy is going to prevail, is going to win in Iraq,” said Allawi, who is heading to the United Nations for this week’s General Assembly session.
In an interview with ABC’s “This Week,” Allawi also said that ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and his lieutenants would go on trial soon. “Roughly speaking, I think October,” Allawi said in the interview.
He said he did not think the trial would take long because the evidence against Saddam was “overwhelming.” He also noted that the death penalty — which was suspended during the US administration of Iraq — has been restored, but did not say whether he expected the ousted dictator to be executed if convicted. Since his capture last December, Saddam has been held in US detention at an undisclosed location awaiting trial on broad charges of killing rivals, gassing Kurds, invading Kuwait and suppressing uprisings. Eleven of Saddam’s top lieutenants also face trial.
The videotape of an Al-Qaeda-linked group yesterday showed the beheadings of three workers of a Kurdish political party while a group of Iraqi National Guard captives was paraded in another videotape broadcast on Al-Jazeera television. The kidnappers of the 15 national guardsmen threatened to kill them unless the authorities released an aide to Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr. Calling itself the Mohammed bin Abdullah Brigades, the group demanded the immediate release of Hazem Al-Araji, representative of Sadr in the Baghdad suburb of Kadhimiya.
The video showing the apparent beheadings of the three Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) members was posted on a website. The tape from the Army of Ansar Al-Sunna appeared to show the heads of the three young men being severed and placed on top of their bodies. Earlier, the three were shown introducing themselves as KDP members and showing their identification papers.
The militant group said in a statement the bodies of the three “agents” were left near Mosul to serve as an “example”. “The puppet Kurdish groups... have pledged allegiance to the crusaders and continue to fight Islam and its people,” said the statement.
The group said it had ambushed the three men near Taji, a town just north of Baghdad, as they were moving military vehicles to a base in northern Iraq.
A Kurdish political source said the three men were ordinary Kurds who had been abducted when their car broke down. The source said the men shown on the tape were believed to be those whose decapitated bodies were found Wednesday dumped in bags by the side of a road north of Baghdad.
The KDP is one of two main Kurdish groups represented in Iraq’s interim government. Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari is a top KDP member.
Britain’s Foreign Office yesterday launched a televised appeal on Al-Arabiya satellite channel for Iraqis to help rescue British hostage Kenneth Bigley who faces a death threat along with two US kidnap victims. “We are looking for any information that could help bring about the release of Kenneth,” Foreign Office spokesman Dean McLoughlin said.
“We guarantee absolute discretion and will not divulge the names of those who provide the information,” said the spokesman, who read out the telephone numbers of the British Embassy in Baghdad and the Iraqi police headquarters.
Iraqi and American forces conducting a raid southeast of Baghdad freed a Jordanian civil servant who said he was abducted by gunmen 15 days ago. Alaa Thabet Youssef Hasweh was taken to a police station in Nassiriyah, about 320 km southeast of Baghdad, following the joint operation, his brother, Wafa, said after speaking to the former hostage by telephone.
A suicide car bomb killed three people in the northern city of Samarra, where US and Iraqi commanders had been claiming some success against militants. The attack came less than a week after American forces re-entered the city, 100 km north of Baghdad, for the first time since May 30 as part of a peace deal brokered by tribal leaders.
Under the pact, US forces agreed to provide millions of dollars in reconstruction funds in exchange for an end to attacks on American and Iraqi troops.
One Iraqi soldier, a civilian and the suicide bomber died in the blast, which also wounded four American and three Iraqi soldiers, said Maj. Neal O’Brien of the Army’s 1st Infantry Division.
— Additional input from agencies
