Hussein Meets With Lawyer; Marine, 11 Others Slain in Iraq

Saddam Hussein met with a defense lawyer Thursday for the first time since his capture a year ago, and his legal team reported that the former Iraqi ruler was in good health and his morale was strong.

The unidentified attorney spent four hours with Hussein at an undisclosed detention site, said his chief lawyer, Ziad Khasawneh.

“He looked much better than his earlier public appearance when he was arraigned a few months ago,” Khasawneh said.

Several of Hussein’s top aides are scheduled to appear in court in several days for hearings on war crimes charges. But the interim Iraqi government’s push to begin the trials for Hussein’s former lieutenants before national assembly elections take place Jan. 30 has sparked dissent within the Cabinet.

“Trials as symbolic as those against the dignitaries of the former regime should only start after the establishment of an Iraqi government with ballot-box legitimacy,” Iraqi Justice Minister Malik Dohan Hassan said in an interview published Thursday in the daily newspaper Le Temps of Geneva.

Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said Tuesday that proceedings before the Iraqi Special Tribunal could begin as early as next week. But Hussein will not be among the first to appear in court.

In other developments Thursday, a U.S. Marine was killed in action in Al Anbar province west of Baghdad, the military said.

Insurgents killed at least 11 other people Thursday, including a government official who was gunned down in the capital and three refugees slain in a rocket attack in northern Iraq.

Unidentified gunmen killed Qassim Mehawi, deputy head of the Communications Ministry, as he went to work in Baghdad. A roadside bomb in west Baghdad damaged an SUV, then gunmen opened fire, killing a foreigner and wounding two people. The nationalities of the victims were not released.

Three Iraqi national guardsmen died and six were injured by another bomb blast in west Baghdad.

In the northern city of Kirkuk, a rocket slammed into a Kurdish refugee housing compound, killing three people, police Brig. Gen. Sarhad Qader said.

About 30 miles south of Kirkuk, two Kurdish brothers were shot to death in their shop in the predominantly Sunni Arab town of Hawija. Qader said the killers wrote graffiti on the shop walls saying, “No Kurds in Hawija.”

In Ramadi, west of Baghdad, militants told journalists they killed an Italian citizen after he tried to break through a guerrilla roadblock.

An Italian passport and Lebanese residency permit displayed by the gunmen identified the man as Salvatore Santoro. A document from the Italian Embassy in Beirut seeking an Iraqi visa for the man called him an aid worker helping Iraqi children.