Saddam's brother slips through net

Sunday Times (London), 15 December 2002, by Jon Swain

Copyright 2002 Times Newspapers Limited

A RUTHLESS half-brother of Saddam Hussein has escaped arrest and trial in Switzerland on genocide charges after being freed to return to Iraq.

Barzan Tikriti, a former head of Saddam's intelligence service who had served as Iraq's ambassador to Switzerland during the 1990s, was accused of supervising an operation to kill thousands of Kurdish villagers during the Iran-Iraq war and of taking part in torture and beatings. He was also involved in Iraq's nuclear programme, allegedly torturing reluctant scientists to work on a bomb.

However, at the end of October he slipped out of Geneva after being denied a new visa. He is now untouchable in Baghdad. The circumstances of Barzan's departure have dismayed war crime investigators who had tried to persuade the Swiss to arrest him. His escape has prompted speculation that Switzerland made him leave so as to avoid a diplomatically awkward investigation.

The pursuit of Barzan was led by Indict, a London-based human rights group. It had amassed evidence against him and presented it to the Swiss authorities 15 months ago.

"It is an extreme disappointment that the Swiss did not act on the information we gave them," said Ann Clwyd, the MP who heads the organisation.

The Indict dossier claimed that Barzan had pulled out fingernails, thrown boiling water over prisoners, beaten them with cables and administered electric shocks while he was director-general of the Mukhabarat, Iraq's intelligence agency, from 1979 to 1983.

On April 4, 1980, said the dossier, Professor Mohammed Bakr al-Sadr, a leading Shi'ite mullah, was murdered with a nail that was pushed through his head. Barzan is said to have burnt off his beard and tortured him with electricity to obtain a pledge of loyalty to the regime.

The chief accusation against Barzan, however, was that he committed genocide during a crackdown on Iraq's Kurdish minority. In 1983 he allegedly took charge of an operation to punish Iraqi Kurds suspected of aiding the Iranians.

Eyewitnesses claimed that under his direction thousands of males aged between 14 and 70 from one tribe were arrested, held in camps near Irbil, northern Iraq, and then taken away.

The men were never seen again and none has emerged from prisons during the recent amnesty announced by Saddam. According to one statement in the dossier, 300 350 men were buried in a mass grave near Kirkuk after being shot, some by Barzan personally. A total of 3,500 to 8,000 are believed to have been killed.

Barzan also reportedly participated in the deportation and mass murder of the inhabitants of the village of Dujail after an attempt on Saddam's life.

Indict told the Swiss federal prosecutor earlier this year that it could produce as many as 30 witnesses to support the case against Barzan. In June, Clwyd visited Switzerland and alerted foreign ministry and judicial authorities. She thought she had received a sympathetic hearing and said she now felt badly let down.

Since September 2000 Switzerland has included the crime of genocide in its penal code. But the federal prosecutor's office said last week there were not enough "substantial suspicions" to pursue the investigation and the genocide law was anyway not retrospective.

Indict believes, however, that Switzerland could have tried Barzan in a military court of the kind used in connection with the Rwandan genocide.

Barzan is one of Saddam's three half-brothers. He moved to Switzerland after leaving Baghdad in 1983 following a family feud. In 1989 he became Iraqi ambassador to the UN in Geneva, a role that made him his country's permanent representative to the UN commission on human rights. He had a clandestine parallel duty as Saddam's "banker in the West", managing a secret financial network.

He was recalled home in 1998 amid signs that he had fallen out of favour. At the start of 2000 he was rehabilitated by Saddam, but he still has a long standing feud with Uday, Saddam's paranoid and violent elder son, who is married to Barzan's daughter Saja.