Gunmen assassinate Saddam co-defendant's attorney

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Masked gunmen assassinated a second defense lawyer in the Saddam Hussein trial Tuesday, raising new worries that Baghdad's chaos may prevent the U.S.-backed government from holding a trial seen as fair and credible.

As lawyers Adel al-Zubeidi and Thamir al-Khuzaie drove in western Baghdad after midday, gunmen pulled abreast in a car and blasted the lawyers' vehicle broadside with automatic rifles. Al-Zubeidi was killed.

Saddam's supporters and the government blamed each other for the killing. An Iraqi government special tribunal is trying Saddam and seven co-defendants for allegedly ordering the executions of more than 140 men from the village of Dujail, near Baghdad, after an attack there on Saddam in 1995.

Many international legal and human-rights specialists have called for the trial to be held outside Iraq, or by a court that includes international as well as Iraqi jurists. Tuesday's assassination was the latest way in which fear has weakened hopes for a credible trial.

At the case's first hearing, on Oct. 19, dozens of witnesses failed to appear because of what the chief judge said was intimidation by Saddam's supporters. The next day, men wearing Interior Ministry police uniforms kidnapped Saadoun al-Janabi, who, like Tuesday's victims, was an attorney for a co-defendant — Awad al-Bandar, a former official in Saddam's Baath party. His body was found that same day.

Al-Zubeidi and al-Khuzaie were defending Saddam's half-brother, Barzan Ibrahim, and the former Iraqi vice president, Taha Yassin Ramadan.

If Saddam were to be tried at an international tribunal such as the one hearing Bosnian war crimes cases at the Hague in the Netherlands, he would not be eligible for the death penalty, as he is in Iraq.

The killings call into question the prospects that Saddam and his co-defendants can receive a fair trial, said Richard Dicker of the New York-based Human Rights Watch, who is monitoring the trial proceedings.

"Urgent measures need to be taken to improve security for these defense attorneys," he said.

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