Arrest warrants issued for Chalabi, nephew

BAGHDAD, Iraq – The interim government Sunday issued arrest warrants on murder charges against Salem Chalabi, head of the country’s special tribunal, and on counterfeiting charges against former Governing Council member Ahmad Chalabi, adding to the country’s political turmoil.

Ahmad Chalabi, a longtime opposition leader, was a Pentagon favorite in the years leading up to the Iraq war, but he fell out of favor this spring over allegations that his political faction gave flawed intelligence to U.S. agents and leaked U.S. secrets to Iran.

Ahmad Chalabi and interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi have clashed as political rivals over issues such as Allawi’s moves to partially reverse the country’s “de-Baathification” process.

Salem Chalabi, Ahmad’s nephew, has been in charge of the effort to try ousted President Saddam Hussein on war-crimes charges.

“They should be arrested and then questioned, and then we will evaluate the evidence, and then if there is enough evidence, they will be sent to trial,” Zuhair Maliky, Iraq’s chief investigating judge, said Sunday.

Ahmad Chalabi had been recognized by President Bush at his most recent State of the Union speech. Spokesmen for the White House and the State Department said the charges were up to the Iraqis to deal with.

Supporters such as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz were not available for comment.

Both Chalabis denied the charges, which they said were politically motivated.

“I’m going to go back to confront those lies,” Ahmad Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, told CNN, speaking from Tehran, Iran. “There is no case here. I will go back to meet those charges head-on… . This judge should recuse himself, because he went on many times in the American press attacking me personally on political grounds.”

Ahmad Chalabi accused Maliky of trying to derail Saddam’s trial. “He attacked the court, he attacked the trial of Saddam Hussein in the press,” Chalabi said.

The warrant against Ahmad Chalabi reportedly accuses him of counterfeiting old Iraqi dinars. But he told CNN that he was working as head of the Governing Council’s Finance Committee to try to stop the circulation of false currency, and that the counterfeit bills had been in the possession of the committee.

“All this was done under the auspices of the Finance Committee to stop the forgeries and to put a stop to the theft,” he said. “Without a doubt, I’m being set up… . They think they can hurt me by doing this, politically.”

Salem Chalabi described the accusation against his uncle as “very weird.”

Word of the investigation against Salem Chalabi in connection with the May slaying of Haitham Fadhil, a Finance Ministry official who was investigating the Chalabi family, was first reported by the Los Angeles Times last week. Iraq’s top criminal court has been investigating allegations that Salem Chalabi threatened Fadhil days before he was assassinated.

Fadhil, who was shot and killed May 28, had been preparing a report on reclaiming government-owned real estate. According to the source who spoke earlier with the Times, the document concluded that members of the Chalabi family and their political party, the Iraqi National Congress, had illegally seized hundreds of pieces of property after the U.S.-led invasion last year.

The property, the source said, included government offices, mansions and agricultural land.

“The warrant for me has to do with the fact that apparently I threatened somebody. I have no recollection of ever meeting that person,” Salem Chalabi told CNN. “But apparently I threatened somebody who subsequently was killed. Reports are indicating that the day that I supposedly visited his office, which I deny ever having visited because I don’t even know the person in question, there are minutes of meetings that I was attending that day somewhere else, at the Governing Council. So it just seems to me a strange kind of occurrence that they would make something like this.”

Salem Chalabi, 41, denied involvement in the slaying and said the allegations were aimed at removing him as executive director of the Iraqi Special Tribunal, which will try top officials of Saddam’s government for crimes against humanity.

“It enrages me that someone makes these allegations,” Salem Chalabi said when the investigation was first revealed.

In the months since the Bush administration turned against onetime American favorite Ahmad Chalabi, he has tried to transform himself into an Iraqi populist.