Famous French lawyer to defend Saddam

A French lawyer infamous for defending terrorists and a Nazi leader today said he has been asked to defend Saddam Hussein.

Jacques Verges told France-Inter radio he had received a letter from Saddam’s family confirming his role as attorney for the former Iraqi leader.

“I was ready to defend him and then I received a letter from his nephew,” Verges said, and read aloud a portion of the correspondence.

The letter read: “In my capacity as nephew of President Saddam Hussein, I commission you officially by this letter to assure the defence of my uncle,” Verges said.

He did not name the person who sent the letter.

The timetable for a trial of Saddam, who was captured by US forces on December 14, is not yet clear, nor are the charges that might be brought.

US officials said earlier this month that a team of 50 Justice Department prosecutors, investigators and support staff were to go to Iraq to assemble war crimes cases against Saddam and others in his former regime.

Verges has defended Venezuelan terrorist Carlos the Jackal, confessed serial killer Charles Sobhraj and the Nazi Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie.

More recently, Khieu Samphan, a former head of state for the Khmer Rouge, last month picked Verges to defend him at a proposed genocide trial for surviving leaders of the group that ruled Cambodia in the 1970s.

The former top Khmer Rouge official is among just a few surviving leaders of the now-defunct communist movement who are wanted for trial at a planned United Nations-assisted tribunal in Cambodia.

Some 1.7 million Cambodians died from starvation, disease, overwork and execution as a result of the fanatical Khmer Rouge regime’s attempts to create a utopian agricultural society from 1975-79.

Khieu Samphan said he has known Verges since he was a student in France in the 1950s, when the two were active in student movements against the French war in Vietnam and French colonialism.