Saddam meets lawyers for first time since capture
Ahead of next week’s start of the trials of his lieutenants, Saddam’s defence team, based in Amman, said after the meeting with a lawyer that he appeared to be “in good health.”
Ziad al-Khasawneh, the head of the toppled Iraqi dictator’s legal team, said Saddam had four hours of talks.
He declined to identify the lawyer, but said he was Iraqi and that the meeting took place at Saddam’s undisclosed detention site in Baghdad.
“He was in good health and his morale was high and very strong,” al-Khasawneh said. “He looked much better that his earlier public appearance when he was arraigned a few months ago.”
He provided few details on the meeting.
Al-Khasawneh said he did not know when Saddam, who was arraigned in July, would next be brought to court.
Interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said that war crimes trials against Iraq’s former Baath Party leaders will begin next week. Saddam will not be among those to appear in court.
Saddam will be the last to go on trial, “long after” the elections, Justice Minister Malek Dohan al-Hassan told a Swiss newspaper.
Hassan criticised US policy and the elections, which he said were being organised in “a climate of fear” and “under a banner of blood.”
He accused Washington of wanting the outcome of the polls to produce a strong opposition and a weak coalition government. “This would allow them to continue to pull the strings” of power, he said.
Many members of Iraq’s deposed regime have been in jail for more than a year, and few have been able to meet with lawyers.
Saddam’s Jordan-based lawyers have complained that they have not seen the fallen dictator and accused the Iraqi and US governments of breaching his right to a lawyer.
Saddam has been held at an unspecified US-controlled jail since he was captured on December 13 last year, eight months after he was toppled in the US-led war.
His legal team was appointed by his wife, Sajida.
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