A mortar attack on a Sunni district of Baghdad killed six people and gunmen kidnapped a legal expert, a security official said on Sunday, as Iraq braced itself for Saddam Hussein’s judgement day.
In one attack late on Saturday, suspected Shi’ite militia fired mortars into a district surrounding a Sunni mosque in the Adhamiyah neighbourhood, killing six civilians and wounding 20 more, police said.
In a separate incident, gunmen in jeeps stormed the house of Dhia al-Din Mehdi Hussein, a professor in criminal law at Baghdad’s Mustansiriyah University, and kidnapped him, an Interior Ministry official said.
The attacks took place on the eve of the verdict in ousted Iraqi leader Saddam’s trial for crimes against humanity, and preceded the imposition of a total curfew on the streets of the capital.
Ahead of the judgement, Iraq’s beleaguered military was on a war footing and a total curfew came into force in three flashpoint provinces; the war-torn capital Baghdad, the sectarian battlefields of Diyala and Saddam’s home region of Salaheddin.
Thunder rumbled over the capital and a chill drizzle fell on Saddam’s former palaces, many of them now American military bases, as the streets of Baghdad emptied and United States military helicopters clattered overhead. Police manned checkpoints and fished a solitary corpse from the Tigris.
In the eye of the gathering storm, in Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone, lawyers were preparing for a historic televised hearing at which Saddam and seven alleged henchmen will hear whether they are to face the gallows.
The Iraqi High Tribunal was expected to start sitting in its windowless bunker at about 10.30am (7.30am GMT), with Saddam and his former allies in the dock and Judge Rauf Abdel Rahman leading a panel sitting in judgement.
The accused were expected to be each given a chance to speak, after which Rahman would hand down a summary of the verdicts and begin reading a 300-page ruling designed to insulate the judgement from appeal, officials have said.
Saddam and two other defendants are charged with crimes against humanity — his half-brother Barzan Hassan al-Tikriti and his former vice-president Taha Yassin Ramadan — and face the death penalty if convicted.
Any verdict carrying a death sentence or a sentence of life imprisonment will automatically be subject to review by a panel of appeal judges, who will decide whether to allow an eventual retrial.
If the judgement stands, however, Saddam must be executed within 30 days of the appeals panel delivering its verdict, the chief prosecutor has said.
Iraq’s current government is far from a neutral observer in the case — indeed, many experts have accused it of heavy-handed intervention in sacking Rahman’s predecessor and applying pressure on the proceedings.
”We hope the sentence matches what this man deserves for what he has done against the Iraqi people. The Iraqi people will express happiness in the way they find appropriate,” Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said on Saturday.
”We call upon the Iraqi people to be calm, to be disciplined and to express themselves in ways that take into consideration the security challenge and the need to protect the lives of citizens,” he added.
Saddam and his fellow defendants stand accused of ordering the village of Dujail to suffer a savage collective punishment after agents of al-Maliki’s Dawa party attempted to kill the then Iraqi leader there in 1982.
The community’s orchards were ripped up and 148 Shi’ite civilians were dragged before a Ba’ath Party kangaroo court and sentenced to death.
Such an accusation still carries a potent political charge more than three-and-a-half years after Saddam was driven from power by a US-led invasion, amid ongoing sectarian bloodshed and effective occupation by US forces.
Iraq’s Shi’ite majority seized upon the fall of the Sunni dictator and the old elite to seize power and seek vengeance for crimes such as the destruction of Dujail, while the country has slipped into sectarian war.
Many of the Sunni insurgents fighting the US-backed regime remain loyal to Saddam’s memory. Last month, for example, tribal sheikhs paraded outside Kirkuk, brandishing portraits of their deposed leader and demanding his restoration.
Such armed groups — including the Islamic Army of Iraq, which is made up of former Ba’ath Party cadres and veterans of Saddam’s armed forces — have been at the forefront of attacks on US and government forces.
Whether they have reserves of fury yet to unleash may become evident in the aftermath of the verdict. — Sapa-AFP