BAGHDAD, 17 December 2004 — For the first time since his capture a year ago, ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein yesterday met his family-appointed lawyers.
Meanwhile, an Italian hostage was reported killed, adding to the violence around the start of campaigning for the first post-Saddam elections yesterday.
With the United States stressing the need for elections to go ahead as planned on Jan. 30, Washington pressed for greater United Nations involvement in the poll.
But UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan remained cautious about prospects for augmenting UN staff in the battleground country.
Ahead of next week’s planned start of the trials of his lieutenants, Saddam’s defense team based in Amman said after the meeting with a lawyer that he appeared to be “in good health”.
Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, meanwhile, added fuel to the ongoing insurgency with a call for his Islamist fighters to focus their attacks on oil facilities in Iraq and the Gulf, in a new audiotape message attributed to him.
“Take jihad (holy war) to stop (the Americans) getting hold of (the oil). Concentrate your operations on the oil, in particular in Iraq and the Gulf,” said the voice on the tape attributed to him.
As the death toll from Wednesday’s blast in Kerbala rose to 10, fanning fears of sectarian violence ahead of the elections, a top telecoms official was gunned down in Baghdad.
And an Islamist group in Iraq claimed it had killed an Italian hostage identified as Salvatore Santoro, Al-Jazeera television reported, saying it had a videotape.
Italy’s Foreign Ministry said it believed the body of a man killed by an Islamist group in Iraq was that of Italian national Salvatore Santoro.
Al-Jazeera broadcast pictures of Santoro’s passport and showed him sitting bound and blindfolded in a ditch with a gun to his head. In separate footage, four masked and armed men were shown reading a statement.
Quoting a statement from the “Islamic Movement of Iraqi Mujahedeen”, Al-Jazeera said Santoro had been killed and the group had found evidence that he supported the Americans. It did not give further details.
The bodies of two more men apparently executed by insurgents were also found, in the area just south of Baghdad dubbed the triangle of death, residents said.
The corpses were hauled out of the Euphrates River on Wednesday afternoon near the Sunni rebel stronghold of Mussayeb with the help of police. One body was headless and had its hands tied. The other bore bullet wounds and, according to medics at the local hospital, was that of a university guard from the nearby city of Kerbala.
The two corpses were among eight recovered from the region on Wednesday alone.
On the political front, following an accusation by Iraq’s Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan that Syria and Iran were orchestrating terrorist attacks, US President George W. Bush warned the two neighbors not to meddle in Iraq’s affair.
Iraqi authorities and US-led forces are struggling to cope with the deadly insurgency ahead of the first multiparty polls in Iraq in half a century.
Two National Guards were killed and two wounded yesterday by armed men at a guards’ checkpoint near Latifiyah, south of Baghdad, while a policeman was killed in a bomb attack near Tikrit.
The deaths followed those of two other National Guards and a police captain in separate attacks north of the capital on Wednesday.
Senior officials working for the Iraqi interim government and members of the country’s fledgling security forces have been the target of relentless attacks by insurgents.
Voters are to choose 275 delegates to the National Assembly, whose task will be to draft a permanent constitution and oversee a government to replace the interim line-up picked in June by the now defunct US-led occupation authority.
Some 7,200 candidates on 107 lists have been registered for the vote, according to final figures. Posters lining Baghdad streets were the only real sign of political campaigning in the country, with no party yet having announced any rallies or meetings, as violence continued to rock the country.
As campaigning kicked off, the interim government announced it would begin trials of top officials of Saddam’s ousted regime as early as next week.
Investigative hearings into the cases are also due to begin, the special tribunal set up for the trials said, without specifying a timetable. Saddam will be the last to go on trial, “long after” the elections, Justice Minister Malek Dohan Al-Hassan told a Swiss newspaper.
