BAGHDAD, Nov 27: Iraqi police said they have smashed an Al Qaeda cell plotting to kill the chief judge in charge of building the case against ousted leader Saddam Hussein, whose trial resumes on Monday after a five-week recess.
“We arrested 12 members of a cell linked to the Iraqi branch of Al Qaeda during a dawn raid on a house in eastern Kirkuk,” in northern Iraq, police colonel Anwar Kader said on Saturday.
“They confessed during questioning to planning to kill (chief judge) Raed al-Juhi this week.”
Juhi is the chief investigative judge on the Iraqi High Tribunal which is tasked with judging former regime officials, including Saddam, for crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide.
Kader said all the suspects were Sunni Arabs from Kirkuk, from Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit or from the restive western province of Al-Anbar.
The suspects also confessed to helping to carry out suicide attacks in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah in October in which 10 people were killed, he said.
Security will be a top priority when the trial of Saddam and seven former henchmen resumes Monday in Baghdad on charges of killing 148 men and youths from the Shia town of Dujail, north of the capital, after the former leader escaped an assassination attempt there in 1982.
Saddam, 68, who refuses to recognize the court, and his former aides have pleaded not guilty to the charges. They face the death penalty if convicted.
On Monday, the court is expected to call the first witnesses for the prosecution, who may testify from behind screens or with faces masked to protect their anonymity.
Saddam is likely to face a raft of other charges, ranging from the massacre of Kurds in 1988, a brutal crackdown against Shias in 1991 and crimes committed during the wars against Iran and Kuwait.
Abdul Aziz Hakim, the leader of Iraq’s most powerful Shia political party, on Sunday accused the judiciary of “weakness” because of the delay in bringing Saddam to trial, almost two years after his capture. —AFP
