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BAGHDAD, Dec 18: Saddam Hussein's cousin and feared lieutenant Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as "Chemical Ali", and former defence minister Sultan Hashem appeared before an investigating magistrate on Saturday, an Iraqi judge said.
The hearings, promised by the interim government as it began campaigning for the first post-Saddam election, were the first of a new stage in the trial process that will press war crimes and other charges against Saddam and 11 others, officials said.
Raed Jouhi, the chief investigating judge for the Special Tribunal set up to try the leaders of the old regime, told reporters there was no set timetable for the trials and that the other accused would also have many hearings in the investigation stage, which would determine whether to send them for trial.
Prime Minister Iyad Allawi had said last week, as campaigns began for the Jan 30 election, that "trials" would begin next week. But Mr Jouhi stressed this was not formally the start of trial but merely a preliminary stage of the legal process.
"Hurrying will not help this case," he said.
International human rights campaigners had voiced concerns that Mr Allawi might rush trials through. Lawyers for Saddam and the others complained they had not had access to their clients.
Saddam saw a lawyer for the first time on Thursday, just over a year since he was captured on Dec 13, 2003.
Majid, who earned his soubriquet for his role in using poison gas against Kurdish villagers in the late 1980s, and General Hashem were both represented by lawyers, Jouhi said.
An official from the British embassy, which is working closely with the Iraqi interim government on the trial process, said they understood that the pair were the first of the 12 to face a judge in this way. Saddam and the others last appeared to hear the broad thrust of charges against them in July.
FIVE TURKS KILLED: Five Turkish security guards were killed in an ambush as they were travelling by car through Iraq to Baghdad, the Turkish foreign ministry said on Saturday.
Earlier an official in the Iraqi town of Mosul was quoted as saying the attackers had machinegunned the guards and decapitated one of them after telling them to get out of the cars.
A foreign ministry statement quoted by the Anatolia news agency, said eight guards had crossed Turkey's border with Iraq at Habur in four cars, and were on their way to the embassy in Baghdad, when they were attacked around the flashpoint Iraqi city of Mosul.
Five of the security guards along with two Iraqi drivers were killed. Two survivors reached Baghdad, while a third returned to the border at Habur, the statement said.
"Armed men made the passengers get out of the cars, lie on the ground, machine-gunned them and cut off the head off one of them," Muhammet Tahir, an official of the Turkmen Front in Mosul, was quoted as telling the Turkish press agency DHA.
It said US forces who controlled the region had killed two of the attackers. The CNN-Turk website said one of the victims was a police inspector while three were police officers.
About 70 Turkish nationals, mainly truck drivers, have so far been killed in Iraq since the US-led invasion last year, most of them in road violence and several at the hands of hostage-takers.
In Mosul Lieutenant Colonel Paul Hastings, spokesman for Task Force Olympia, said that at 6pm, "soldiers of the multinational force went to a crossroads at Yarmuk and discovered three male bodies evidently killed earlier during the day in a rebel attack".-AFP
