IRAQ: Iraq's new prime minister, Mr Iyad Allawi, announced yesterday that Saddam Hussein would be turned over formally to Iraqi custody today and charged by a judge in an Iraqi court tomorrow.
"This government has formally requested the transfer of the most notorious and high profile detainees," Mr Allawi told a hastily arranged news conference. "These people . . . will face justice before the special Iraqi court created in January to try members of the former regime for crimes against humanity, genocide and war crimes."
Iraqis and Americans are making a strained distinction between "legal" and "physical" custody. Saddam will continue to be held by the US military, to prevent Ba'athist loyalists from staging an attack to free him. Mr Allawi said the trial would begin several months from now.
The 11 "high profile detainees" to be charged with Saddam are expected to include his former vice president, Mr Taha Yassin Ramadan, and the longtime foreign minister and deputy prime minister, Mr Tariq Aziz.
Asked what message he was trying to convey by making Saddam's indictment the first move of the new administration, Allawi said: "The Iraqi government means business and wants to do business and wants to stabilise Iraq. We want to put this bad history behind us."
Mr Allawi said former president Saddam and his co-accused were being granted rights that they denied to Iraqis, including freedom to appoint lawyers, provided they were approved by the Iraqi lawyers' syndicate.
But some have expressed doubts about the possibility of the former dictator getting a fair trial. After Saddam was captured last December, President Bush said he should be sentenced to death. The now defunct Governing Council appointed Mr Salem Chalabi, the nephew of one of its members, Mr Ahmad Chalabi, to set up the Iraqi Special Tribunal which will try Saddam. The US government has accused Mr Ahmad Chalabi of providing it with false information about weapons of mass destruction.
"I don't think this will be a fair trial because the tribunal was set up by people who were opponents of the former regime," an Iraqi official said. "The judges were chosen by Salem Chalabi instead of the judicial council. Some were lawyers, not judges, and they are paid twice the normal salary for judges and given trips outside the country."
Mr John Negroponte, the first US ambassador to Iraq since the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, presented his credentials yesterday to President Gazi Yawar, who was sworn in on Monday.
Mr Negroponte said his embassy would help the government "defeat terrorists and criminal elements who oppose a free Iraq". He has already sent out invitations to US independence day celebrations on July 4th, but some diplomats in Baghdad are reluctant to board a bus to an unknown destination inside the re-named International Zone, formerly the so-called Green Zone.
Elsewhere yesterday, it was a normal day in Iraq, with three US Marines killed by a roadside bomb in Canal Street, where UN headquarters were blown up last year. Bombs exploded at a military academy in Baghdad, the police station in Mahmoudiya and near a policeman's home in Kirkuk, killing at least two people.
Al Jazeera, the Arab satellite television station, showed two hostage videos. In one, a gunman fired into the back of a man who fell into a hole. The video said it showed the killing of US army private Keith Maupin, who was kidnapped in the ambush of a US convoy on April 9th.
On the second hostage video, a masked man announced the release of three Turkish hostages by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's Tawheed and Jihad group. The kidnappers said the Turks were freed "for the sake of Muslims in Turkey and their demonstrations against Bush".