Lawyer in trial of Saddam kidnapped

BAGHDAD, Iraq – The trial of Saddam Hussein took startling turns Thursday when prosecutors said the first witness would be a bedridden cancer patient who helped run Iraq’s feared intelligence agency. In the first setback, a lawyer for one of the dictator’s co-defendants was kidnapped.

Also Thursday, the U.S. military announced the deaths of five service members, including three killed Wednesday by a roadside bomb near Balad, north of Baghdad, and another by a suicide car bomb near the Syrian border. A fifth soldier died from a nonhostile gunshot, the military said.

Violence in and around Baghdad killed at least 15 Iraqi civilians and police.

The prosecution of Saddam and seven of his regime’s henchmen in a mass-murder case could be a lengthy process. It is the first of up to a dozen that prosecutors plan to bring to trial against Saddam and his Baath Party inner circle for atrocities during their 23-year rule.

Wednesday’s opening session saw the 68-year-old former president proclaim his innocence to charges of murder, torture, forced expulsion and illegal imprisonment stemming from a 1982 massacre of 148 Shiites in Dujail, a mainly Shiite town north of Baghdad, following a failed attempt on Saddam’s life.

The trial will resume Nov. 28, but the court will interview a key witness Sunday because of his poor health.

Wadah Ismail al-Sheik, director of the investigation department at Saddam’s Mukhabarat intelligence agency at the time of the Dujail massacre, will give his testimony in a hospital Sunday, court officials said.

In another trial development, 10 masked gunmen kidnapped the lawyer for one of Saddam’s co-defendants, police said. Saadoun Sughaiyer al-Janabi, who was in the courtroom Wednesday, is one of two lawyers representing Awad Hamed al-Bandar, one of the seven Baath Party officials also being tried.

The gunmen pulled up outside al-Janabi’s office in Baghdad’s eastern Shaab district in the evening, broke into the building and dragged him out.