LONDON, April 16: Opec has invited Saddam Hussein’s oil minister, featured on Washington’s most-wanted list, to a meeting of the cartel in Vienna next week.

“A letter of invitation was sent to the minister of Iraq through the ambassador in Vienna,” an OPEC source said from the cartel’s headquarters in the Austrian capital. He said the invitation followed normal Opec protocol.

“He may decide not to come,” he added.

Oil minister Amir Muhammed Rasheed, was last seen by journalists at the Doura oil refinery on March 25, surrounded by burning pits of oil as bombs fell on nearby Baghdad.

Before becoming oil minister in 1995, he was in charge of Iraq’s military industrialisation.

He now appears as the “six of spades” in the deck of cards listing Washington’s 55 most wanted Iraqis.—Reuters