Envoy of Pope visits Baghdad in peace bid

POPE John Paul II will dispatch an envoy to Iraq in a plea for peace and to encourage Baghdad to co-operate with the United Nations, the Vatican said yesterday.

Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, emeritus president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, will leave for Baghdad today with a counsellor, Monsignor Franco Coppola.

The mission will seek to “show to all the plea of the Holy Father in favour of peace and to help the Iraqi authorities to make a series of reflections on the need for effective international co-operation, based on justice and international rights, with the aim of assuring this population the supreme good of peace,” Papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said in a statement yesterday.