Saddam's defense team demands protection
(AP)
Updated: 2005-11-21 14:54

Saddam Hussein's chief Iraqi attorney said the defense team was unsure if it would attend the next hearing in his trial because its demands for protection have not been answered.

The lawyer of former Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, meanwhile, said he had received death threats and had asked for U.S. and British protection.

Two attorneys representing co-defendants in Saddam's trial have been assassinated since the trial began Oct. 19. Saddam and seven others are on trial for the 1982 deaths of 148 Shiite Muslims. If convicted, they could be executed by hanging.

Aziz has not been charged with any offense but is under investigation for his role in Saddam's regime.

Khalil al-Dulaimi, Saddam's personal attorney, said defense attorneys were awaiting the court's response to demands for protection before deciding whether to attend the Nov. 28 hearing.

Al-Dulaimi outlined two main demands: that the court provide 20 bodyguards of the lawyers' choosing for each of them and their families, and that it assign an international committee to investigate the deaths of the two lawyers.

"We are still not clear on attending the hearing or not," Al-Dulaimi told The Associated Press by telephone from Baghdad. "We want these conditions to be answered."

The Nov. 8 slaying of the attorney Adel al-Zubeidi — in an ambush that wounded another defense lawyer — prompted 1,100 attorneys to withdraw from the defense team, threatening to undermine the legitimacy of the trial.

The body of the first slain lawyer, Saadoun al-Janabi, was found two days after the trial's opening session.

Aziz' attorney, Badee Izzat Aref, said callers to his Baghdad office have threatened to kill him if he continues defending his clients.

Aref, in Jordan on his way back to Iraq, said he e-mailed the American and British ambassadors in Baghdad to say he was "holding them responsible for my killing and telling them my family will sue them if I die."

Aziz has been jailed since he surrendered in April 2003 during the U.S.-led war on Iraq.

Aref said Aziz' daughters visited their father in detention Friday and found him "very tired with heaviness in his voice."

"Aziz told his daughters that he suffered several slight strokes and his teeth were falling out," Aref said.

Al-Dulaimi said international pressure would help persuade the court to respond to the defense team's concerns.

"If there is no international pressure the court will continue to be unyielding to us," he said. "And right now there is no international pressure."