Sign in. It’s quick, free and it’s up to you.
An account is an optional way to support the work we do. Find out more.
IRAQ’S FUGITIVE VICE President Tareq al-Hashemi, a top critic of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, was convicted of murder on Sunday and sentenced to the gallows, in a decision that coincided with a wave of deadly attacks.
The wave of more than 30 attacks, unleashed on Saturday night, killed 88 people and wounded more than 400 across the country, according to security and medical sources.
Hashemi, tried in absentia, has dismissed all charges against him as politically motivated. The court also tried his secretary and son-in-law Ahmed Qahtan in absentia and sentenced him to death.
The trial for the murder of a woman lawyer, a brigadier general and a top security official that opened in May covered the first of some 150 charges against Hashemi, who has been accused of running a death squad, and his bodyguards.
Sunday’s hearing opened with the prosecution asking the court to condemn Hashemi, one of Iraq’s most senior Sunni officials, to death for the first two murders but to drop a charge of involvement in the security official’s killing.
In a case which has raised political tensions, the defence lawyers then read a lengthy closing statement protesting that the trial was unfair and the court exposed to political pressure.
A judge interrupted, warning the defence lawyer: “You are attacking the judicial authority and you will be held responsible if you continue.”
The sentence was issued after about 30 minutes of deliberation by the three judges.
Hashemi himself met in the Turkish capital with Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu on Sunday, in a meeting that was scheduled in advance but coincided with the sentencing, a senior diplomat in Ankara told AFP.
Born in 1942, Hashemi became one of Iraq’s vice presidents in April 2006, the same month that his brother and sister were shot dead in separate attacks.
When he first became a vice president, he was the head of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a group that was said to have connections to some elements of Iraq’s Sunni insurgency following the US-led invasion of 2003.
The party was the driving force in Iraq’s Sunni-led National Concord Front, which helped mastermind the return of the country’s Sunni minority to the political process after the community boycotted January 2005 elections.
Hashemi later founded the Tajdid (Renewal) party, which is a part of Iraqiya, the secular, Sunni-backed bloc that won the most seats in 2010 parliamentary polls only to be outmanoeuvred by Maliki, who retained the premiership.
He was re-elected vice president in 2010 but then accused of running a death squad in mid-December 2011 as the last American soldiers left the country.
Hashemi fled to Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region, which declined to hand him over to the federal government, and then embarked on a tour that took him to Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
He has taken refuge with his family in Istanbul since April under the protection of the Turkish state which refuses to extradite him.
Interpol said in May that it had issued an international Red Notice for the arrest of Hashemi on suspicion of “guiding and financing terrorist attacks.”
It said the notice, its highest possible alert, was issued under an Iraqi warrant “as part of an investigation in which security forces seized bombing materials and arrested individuals.”
Hashemi’s trial heard testimony that silenced pistols were found in raids on his house and that of his son-in-law, while bodyguards and other officials said they were offered money or coerced to carry out attacks on his orders.
Requests by Hashemi’s lawyers for high-ranking officials to testify as character witnesses on his behalf were rejected, and his lawyers walked out of one session after a judge refused to accept their evidence.
In the violence on the streets, meanwhile, the bombings and gun attacks on Saturday and Sunday raised the number of people killed already this month to 118, according to an AFP tally.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
Ironic that Googles company motto when founded was “don’t be evil”, but no matter how well intentioned any endeavor, eventually the owners sell out, shareholders take over and the faceless, no individual accountability means they will fu*k you over in any and every way they can imagine to get rich and when the gravy train ends and it all comes tumbling down the architects are long gone.
Data is the new oil, the most valuable commodity on the planet, with enough of it you can do virtually anything.
@Sean Fahey: that was a very long first sentence.
Won’t have to worry about them soon. What with the UK now out of the EU, GDPR doesn’t apply to them, so it’ll make sense for the likes of Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc to relocate over there, where the UK government will welcome them with open arms and they won’t have Data Commissioners up their ar5e.
@MunsterPI: doesn’t matter where they are located, GDPR still applies in the country where it is implemented.
@DJ François: If they are in a jurisdiction outside of the EU they can tell the EU where to stick their €20m or 4% of global turnover award! Tech & internet companies can be located anywhere in the world to provide their services. If UK is smart, it will drop its Corporation tax to 12% or lower, hype up that GDPR no longer applies, if SF get near power in the Republic and follow through on their tax the multinationals promise, the tech giants will be out of here like butter off a hot knife. When you look at it with Johnson, Brexit and the left surge this general election is shaping up into, Ireland is facing a perfect storm regarding the multinationals we rely so much on.
Is this not just PR following the comment from Germany’s federal data commissioner reported yesterday? There seems to be more investigations started than complete. In fairness, it must be difficult conducting fair personal data processing investigations in these types of companies.
General Data Protection Regulations are a more significant threat to free speech than political correctness.
The onus is now on the person seeking information to prove that they have a right to access it, the authorities are using General Data Protection Regulations like a sword rather than a shield. A lot of information previously available to all is no longer accessible, making researchers work more awkward and expensive to carry out. We need a right to access information similar to that available to all citizens of the USA.
@Pat Coyne: GDPR = General Data Protection Racket. Or as I heard someone so eloquently call it, a Chancers Charter.
have your say