As Defector Returns To Iraq, Critics Predict He’ll Be Killed

The nation’s most famous defector is welcome as an “ordinary citizen,” Iraq said, but critics questioned Wednesday whether Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law would be forgiven now that he has returned.

Iraq’s opponents said Hussein Kamel al-Majid’s return from exile showed him to be a confused man who lacked any real political clout beyond his ties to the Iraqi ruler.

One prominent Iraqi defector said he doubted Saddam had forgiven al-Majid, and predicted he would be killed within a year.

“The defector had talked of his escape last August as ‘the flight of the eagles.’ Should one now talk of ‘the return of the chickens to the coop?”’ asked the Arab Times, an Englishlanguage daily in Saudi Arabia.

Al-Majid, who once headed Iraq’s clandestine weapons program, took a desert highway home to Iraq on Tuesday, barely six months after defecting to Jordan and vowing to topple Saddam.

He was accompanied by his brother, Col. Saddam Kamel, their wives and children. Both men are married to Saddam’s daughters.

Al-Majid’s dramatic departure from Iraq was seen as a major blow to Saddam. The defection did not threaten Saddam’s rule, but al-Majid’s knowledge of the regime’s inner workings forced Baghdad to give U.N. weapons inspectors data on military programs that had been hidden since the Gulf War.

In Baghdad, Iraqi television said Tuesday that the Revolutionary Command Council, which Saddam heads, “decided to approve his appeal and allow him to return to Iraq and deal with him as an ordinary citizen.”

Wafiq Samerrai, Iraq’s head of intelligence until he defected in 1994, said he doubted all would be forgiven.

“I believe that (al-Majid) will be killed this year,” Samerrai said in an interview with The Associated Press in Damascus, Syria.