Iraqi dissident disappears

last updated 8 January 2015

Copenhagen

An Iraqi defector considered a possible replacement for Saddam Hussein disappeared this week, Danish police said. Nizar al-Khazraji, the Iraqi chief of staff in the late 1980s, defected in 1995 and later claimed political asylum in Denmark. An advocate of democracy, he is frequently mentioned as a candidate to head an interim Iraqi government after Saddam is gone. But Danish prosecutors recently forbade him to travel abroad pending an investigation into his possible role in the 1988 poison-gas attack on the Kurds. Kurdish groups say he is innocent, and al-Khazraji has said the case against him was fabricated by Iraqi agents, who’ve tried several times to kill him. Last week, his son Mohammed said, the 64-year-old went out for a morning cigarette and didn’t come back. “My feeling,” Mohammed said, “is that he was kidnapped by Iraqi intelligence.”