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Saddam trial may be delayed again { November 8 2005 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/11/08/iraq.trial.ap/http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/11/08/iraq.trial.ap/
Iraq killings raise trial doubts
Tuesday, November 8, 2005 Posted: 1913 GMT (0313 HKT)
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) -- The murder of a second defense attorney in the trial of Saddam Hussein and other former Iraqi leaders Tuesday raised doubts about the trial's future and calls from legal experts for the court to be relocated outside of Iraq.
Adel al-Zubeidi, the lawyer for former Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan, was shot to death and attorney Thamir al-Khuzaie was wounded in an ambush in the Iraqi capital. It was the second such assassination in a month.
Richard Goldstone, the first prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, told The Associated Press that the latest killing was a signal that it was time to pack up and move the court.
"I don't understand how you can have a fair trial in this atmosphere of insecurity, with bombs going off," Goldstone said in a telephone interview from San Diego, California.
"It is just impossible to have a public trial if you can't guarantee the safety of witnesses, judges of defense counsel."
Goldstone led the first prosecution of Balkan war criminals at a U.N. tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, set up in 1994 when wars still raged in the republics of the former Yugoslavia.
"If the security situation doesn't radically improve, I don't see any possibility of having an appropriate trial in Baghdad," he said.
"The trial should be held in some appropriate neighboring country, one of the Arab countries. My advice would be to start from square one."
Khalil al-Dulaimi, Saddam's leading attorney, blamed the government for the killings and also called for a new, foreign venue.
Saddam and seven others have been charged with the 1982 killings of Shiite villagers in Dujail, a town north of Baghdad, following an assassination attempt against him.
The trial opened October 19 and was suspended until late November to allow the defense time to prepare its case.
But Michael Scharf, a former U.S. State Department lawyer who helped train the Iraqi judges hearing the case, said the defense lawyers themselves were partly responsible for their murders because they refused protection from the Iraqi government and U.S. military.
"The defense attorneys in part brought this tragic situation upon themselves when they elected to have their faces and identities broadcast during the first day of the trial," said Scharf, professor and director of Frederick K. Cox International Law Center at Case Western Reserve University, in an interview.
"Now they are seeking to exploit the tragic -- but not unforeseeable -- murders of their colleagues in an attempt to derail the proceedings."
Scharf said the murder "will certainly raise questions" about the capacity of the court "to guarantee a fair trial and to stick to its schedule."
International law expert Richard Dicker, director of the International Justice Program at the New York-based Human Rights Watch, called for a drastic tightening of security and expressed concerns about the trial's future.
"This killing today and the wounding of a third attorney involved in the Dujail case raises the question as to whether or not the trial can go forward. It cannot go forward if effective measures are not implemented to provide security for defense attorneys who are clearly at risk."
Copyright 2005 The Associated Press.
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