Al Hashemi's trial delayed over venue change plea

Baghdad: The trial in absentia of fugitive Iraqi vice-president Tareq Al Hashemi was delayed a week yesterday after his lawyers called for it to be held in a special court as his allies dismissed the case as politicised.

Al Hashemi, one of Iraq's top Sunni Arab officials, stands accused along with several of his bodyguards of running a death squad, but left Iraq weeks ago and is not expected to attend the trial.

Hours before the trial was due to open yesterday, shootings and bombings erupted in the Harithiyah neighbourhood where the Central Criminal Court of Iraq (CCCI) is situated, although not in the immediate vicinity of the court compound.

An Iraqi soldier was killed in a shooting at 8am, while three roadside bombs wounded two police bomb disposal experts at around the same time, an interior ministry official said.

"The trial has been postponed until May 10," Higher Judicial Council spokesman Abdul Sattar Bayraqdar said.

Lawyers for Al Hashemi called for the case to be held in a special court rather than the CCCI, and a judge is to consider their request before the case resumes in a week.

Assassination charges

"For people such as presidents and prime ministers, throughout the history of Iraq, there have always been special courts to try them," said Muayad Al Ezzi, one of Al Hashemi's eight defence lawyers.

Neither Al Hashemi nor any of his accused bodyguards were present at the court, an AFP journalist said.

Yesterday's trial was to tackle the assassinations of two security officials and a lawyer, Bayraqdar said.

The charges against Al Hashemi were first levelled in December after US troops completed their pull-out, sparking a political crisis that saw the vice-president's bloc boycott cabinet and parliament over accusations Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki was monopolising power.

Al Hashemi and his political allies have slammed the charges as targeting their Iraqiya bloc, which won the most seats in March 2010 parliamentary elections but was outmanoeuvred for the premiership by Al Maliki's alliance.

"The judiciary is politicised," Eyad Al Alawi, a secular Shiite who is leader of the mostly Sunni-backed Iraqiya bloc, told AFP in an interview from the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah.

"There is plenty of evidence of this, not only related to Tareq Al Hashemi, but to previous cases in the judiciary. We do not believe a fair trial will be carried out."

Al Alawi added that a section of the judiciary was "absent, incomplete and not balanced," but did not elaborate further, only saying the Iraqi judiciary "must be reviewed".

Al Hashemi and some of his guards were on Monday also charged with killing six judges, and Bayraqdar put the overall number of accusations against the group at about 150.