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| 10 April 2005 | Sunday | 30 Safar 1426 |
Tariq Aziz will never turn on Saddam: lawyer
“Tariq Aziz told me that he would never attack Saddam Hussein during his trial, that it would not be right for him to do that,” his attorney Badi Aref Izzat said in an interview in Paris.
“But if he is freed, he will write a book where he would tell what he knows. He knows he is innocent. Tariq Aziz is weak physically but strong politically,” Izzat said.
An English-speaking Christian, Aziz, 68, was a former deputy prime minister and foreign minister who became the best known spokesman of Saddam’s regime to the outside world.
He surrendered to American forces on April 24, 2003, shortly after the invasion and the overthrow of the regime.
Izzat, an Iraqi, said he had met with Aziz three times in the two years, including twice last month when “he was in bad physical shape, tired also by the interrogations of the UN commission” investigating alleged misuse of Iraq’s oil-for-food programme.”
He also said Aziz was “completely cut off from the world. I saw him in pyjamas.”
From his cell Aziz can hear the sounds of the fighting. “His American jailers tell him each time that they are explosions organized by the American army to blow up weapons,” Izzat said.
At their last meeting, Aziz, one of only two Christian ministers in Saddam’s cabinet, gave his lawyer a written appeal for help to take to the Vatican, where Aziz had often been received in the past by Pope John Paul II, who died last week.
The appeal said in part that Aziz and the other prisoners were isolated from their families, with no contact, no telephone calls and no letters.
“We have the right to just treatment, just investigations and finally a just trial,” it said.
Aziz is being investigated for crimes against humanity and made an appearance in court in July with 10 other former regime officials and Saddam as part of a preliminary hearing.
Saddam, who is being held at a maximum security prison on a US base near Baghdad airport, appeared defiant at that hearing.—AFP
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