THE newly appointed chief judge in the trial of Saddam Hussein was accused yesterday of having been a senior member of Saddam’s Baath party. It was the latest in a series of blows to the court, which has already suffered the resignation of its chief judge and the murder of two defence lawyers.

The de-Baathification committee, which is in charge of rooting out of public life all senior former members of the outlawed party, has said that Said al-Hammashi held a sufficiently high rank in the party to disqualify him from the job.

Judge al-Hammashi was named last week to head the five-judge panel, which is scheduled to hold its next hearing tomorrow, after the president of the court, Judge Rizgar Amin, quit abruptly, alleging that he could no longer take the pressure of government members criticising him for allowing Saddam to use his court appearances as a platform.

Judge al-Hammashi and 18 other members of the Iraqi Special Tribunal have been accused of having held Baath party ranks that would bar them from their posts, according to Khalid al-Shami, of the de-Baathification committee, which was set up under US occupation. “We have documents for 19 of them, including eight judges and other members of the court, linking them to the Baath party,” Mr al-Shami said. Among their number was Raad Juhi, the former head of the tribunal, who now leads the prosecution.

Under the charter of the special tribunal, senior former Baathists cannot work in the court, but a Western diplomat close to the case said that it was up to the court to judge for itself whether its members had ties to the party that ruled Iraq for 35 years.

Nobody appeared to be sure who had the final say. An official from the office of Ibrahim al-Jaafari said that the outgoing Prime Minister was forming his own committee to resolve the embarrassing issue within 24 hours.

Saddam and his seven co-defendants are accused of killing Shias in the village of Dujail, where gunmen tried to assassinate the dictator in 1982. Members of the defence team have argued that because the court was established under US occupation it lacks the legitimacy to try a president who was overthrown by what they call an illegal military intervention.

The defence also argues that it cannot work in safety, after two of its colleagues were kidnapped and murdered shortly after the trial began in October. Defence officials accused parties inside the Shia-dominated Government of complicity in the killings.

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