BAGHDAD: A Baghdad court on Thursday sentenced 11 Iraqis to death for their roles in the first of a series of audacious attacks last year to target government buildings in the heart of the city.
Iraqi Supreme Judicial Council spokesman Abdul Sattar Bayrkdar said a criminal court in Baghdad’s eastern Risafa district found the 11 defendants guilty of financing, planning and participating in the Aug. 19 bombings that devastated the foreign and finance ministries. The blasts killed more than 100 people.
There have since been two other massive attacks in Baghdad primarily targeting government buildings, in October and December. Those attacks together killed more than 280 people and injured hundreds more.
The attacks have sparked outrage among many Iraqis, shaking their confidence in the nation’s tenuous security gains because they occurred in what are supposed to be some of the safest parts of the city.
Bayrkdar said the defendants have a month to appeal the death sentences, which were handed down with Thursday’s ruling. He declined to provide details about those convicted.
Shortly after the August attacks, the Iraqi military released what it said was the confession of a man identified as a senior member of Saddam Hussein’s ousted Baath Party. The military said the man admitted to supervising the attack against the Finance Ministry. In the televised confession, the 57-year-old suspect identified himself as Wisam Ali Khazim Ibrahim and said he was a Baath Party member and a police officer before the 2003 US-led invasion.
Iraqi authorities said at the time more than 10 people comprising the whole network involved in the attacks had been arrested. Separately, police said they arrested a man Wednesday night who was wanted for his alleged involvement with Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Meanwhile, 15 people were killed and 25 wounded on Thursday when three bombs exploded simultaneously in the city of Najaf, the worst attack to hit Iraq this year, officials said.
A car bomb exploded near a mosque and two other bombs blew up in a retail market in the city, 150 km south of Baghdad, according to a security official.
In another development, Iraq’s election organizers on Thursday barred nearly 500 politicians and parties from contesting the country’s upcoming national poll, including many linked to the Baath Party.
“We decided this afternoon to exclude around 500 names and political entities from the list of candidates,” said Hamida Husseini, an official with the Independent High Electoral Commission. Husseini did not specifically mention the Baath Party, but said the excluded candidates “fell under the law of the Committee of Justice and Integrity” which bars Saddam loyalists from taking part in elections.
