BAGHDAD — Tariq Aziz, a former top aide to Saddam Hussein and his public-relations representative to the world, was sentenced to death by an Iraqi court Tuesday, convicted of crimes against members of rival Shiite political parties.
The sentence was handed down in the latest in a series of criminal cases broughtagainst Aziz, 74, and other top figures in what had been Saddam’s government.
Aziz listened impassively as the sentence was read at Baghdad’s Supreme Criminal Court. Dressed in a casual black shirt and wearing his trademark owlish spectacles,he appeared frail and sickly, gripping the handrail of the prisoner’s dock as the judge spoke.
“Did you hear?” the judge asked, after concluding his remarks. “Yes,” Aziz responded weakly before being ushered out of the courtroom, according to televised footage of the hearing.
For years, Aziz, a former foreign minister and deputy prime minister, served asthe bespectacled face of that government, a cigar-smoking emissary and the highest-ranking Christian in the regime who sought to justify, in fluent English, Iraq’s use of chemical weapons, invasion of oil-rich Kuwait, and killings of Shiites and Kurds.
Among Shiites in the vast, eastern Baghdad slum called Sadr City, a gallows death for one of Saddam’s ardent aideswas considered a fitting end.
“This is a fair judicialcourt ruling against those whose hands are still bloodied,” said Kamil Jassim, a 32-year-old teacher.
Many Sunnis, the minority Muslim sect that dominated Iraq under Saddam, questioned whether the death sentence was merely revenge masquerading as justice.
“The aim of this court, formed by this government, is to kill and liquidate all of the former regime’s senior figures if they committed crimes or not. It is an unfair trial and unfair verdict,” said Jameel Sahib Ali, a 50-yearold merchant in Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit.
Because Saddam rarely left Iraq out of fears for his safety, Aziz often represented Iraq at the United Nations and other global settings, serving as a public defender of Hussein before the American-led invasion of 2003.
Aziz surrendered to American forces shortly after the invasion, aware that, for Americans, he was among Iraq’s most-hunted officials and one of the best-known emblems of the Saddam Hussein era. He was handed over to Iraqi jailers this year as part of the U.S. transfer of security powers to Iraq as it withdrew its last combat troops.
In the long-running case for which he received the death penalty, Aziz was accused of being part of a campaign of persecuting, killing and torturing members of the Shiite opposition and religious parties banned under Saddam. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is a member of one of the religious parties central to the case.
Charles Dunne, an Iraq expert at the Middle East Institute, said the verdict against Aziz will strengthen the prime minister’s tough image as a defender of Shiites.
“It will strengthen his anti-Baathist stand that helped him in the past since it was a strong element of his election campaign,” Dunne said.
Aziz was sentenced to 15 years in prison for taking part in forced displacement, 10 years for committing torture, and death by hanging for participating in deliberate killings. The judge gave no details of Aziz’s specific role.
The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said the Vatican would lobby Iraq to halt the execution. He said that commuting the sentence would encourage reconciliation and the rebuilding of peace and justice in Iraq.
It was unclear when Azizwould be executed, if ever.
One of Aziz’s lawyers, Badea Araf Azzit, said he was considering whether to appeal. He dismissed the sentence as a ploy aimed at distracting attention from Iraq’s political stalemate and the recent publication of a trove of American war records that described widespread prisoner abuse by Iraqi guards and security forces.
“The trial was nothing short of a farce,” said Giovanni Di Stefano, another of Aziz’s lawyers, in a statement. The Iraqi court “has sentenced Aziz to death on allegations that are frankly nothing short of malicious, capricious and nonexistent.”
Aziz’s lawyers have long claimed that he was responsible only for Iraq’s diplomatic and political relations and had no ties to the executions and purges carried out by Saddam’s Baathist government.Saddam was himself hanged in 2006, less than two months after his death sentence had been handed down.
In a telephone interview, Aziz’s son Ziad, 44, said he believed that his father was blindsided by the news. When they spoke on the phone three days earlier, the elder Aziz asked his son to send him clothes, food and medicine and did not mention that sentencing was imminent.
“We don’t know the next step,” Ziad Aziz said. “Wehave no chance of protecting him.”
Ziad Aziz said his father remained in poor health. In January, the American military said in a statement that he had a blood clot in the brain. He was taken to an American military hospital north of Baghdad for treatment.
In March 2009, Aziz was sentenced to 15 years in prison for crimes against humanity, but he was acquitted earlier that month on charges of ordering a 1999 crackdown against Shiite protesters after a revered Shiite cleric was assassinated.
He is also serving a seven-year prison sentence for a case concerning the forced displacement of Kurds in northern Iraq.
Death sentences were also handed down on Tuesday against other former officials in Saddam’s government including Abed Hammoud, a former secretary to Saddam, and former Interior Minister Sadoun Shakir.
Meanwhile, thieves armed with guns and hand grenades stormed a jewelry shop Tuesday in northern Iraq and killed 10 people during a robbery attempt, Iraqi officials said.
The assailants in Tuesday’s robbery attempt in the city of Kirkuk lobbed hand grenades inside the store, prompting a gunfight with police that forced the attackers to fleebefore they could make off with any jewelry, said Brig. Gen. Sarhat Qadir, a police spokesman in the city.
The dead included the store’s three owners and four customers, including a woman and a child, Qadir said.
Three officers were also killed and 11 people were wounded, he said.
In the town of Khalis, a former stronghold of Sunni insurgency 50 miles north of Baghdad, a bomb attached to a car killed a local police commander, said Maj. Ghalib al-Karkhiin, a police spokesman in Diyala province.
Earlier Tuesday, a roadside bomb targeted a convoy carrying a senior Iraqi official while he was traveling through central Baghdad, killing a bystander and injuring four people. The deputy minister of planning, Mahdi Muhsin al-Aalak, was unharmed in the morning rush hour attack in the Karradah neighborhood, police and hospital officials in the capital said.
They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.
In other developments, the political gamesmanship over who will control Iraq’s new government continued Tuesday. Former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi traveled to Erbil to meet with the Kurdish region’s president, Massoud Barzani, whose support is likely to be critical in breaking the deadlock.
The Kurds emerged as political kingmakers after March elections failed to produce a clear winner, precipitating a deadlock between al-Maliki’s Shiite coalition and the group led by Allawi, which narrowly won the most seats in Parliament. Al-Maliki, who has remained acting prime minister during the deadlock, now appears likely to keep his job after winning the support of a bloc led by Muqtada al-Sadr, a Shiite cleric known for his anti-American bent and intimate ties to Iran.
Adel Berwari, a member of the Kurdistan Alliance, said the competing groups needed to discuss “all the disagreements” over issues like control of the Iraqi presidency, which is now occupied by the Kurdish politician Jalal Talabani, and disputed territorial boundaries, as they seek “the end to this crisis.” Information for this article was contributed by Jack Healy, Khalid D. Ali and Zaid Thaker of The New York Times; by Barbara Surk, Rebecca Santana, Sameer N. Yacoub, Lara Jakes, Mazin Yahya and Yahya Barzanji of The Associated Press; and by Liz Sly and Raheem Salman of the Los Angeles Times.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 10/27/2010