Naharnet Newsdesk - Nora Tamimi Says U.S. Helped Saddam Assassinate her Father in Beirut

Nora Tamimi Says U.S. Helped Saddam Assassinate her Father in Beirut

The daughter of a leading Iraqi opposition activist who was assassinated in Beirut by Saddam's secret service in 1994 says she will sue the ousted Iraqi dictator before three international courts, charging that the U.S. was a virtual accomplice in her father's murder.
Nora al Tamimi, daughter of slain Iraqi opposition activist Taleb al Suhail al Tamimi, said from Beirut in a newspaper interview published Saturday that her father had planned a coup d'etat to overthrow Saddam in 1993, operating from Beirut and Amman.

"Zero hour was set for a certain June day in 1993 to stage the coup when Saddam would have been sponsoring an official event in Baghdad," Nora told the London-based Asharq Al Awsat newspaper in an interview conducted at the family house in Beirut.

"But the Americans, who did not want the coup to succeed possibly because they were certain my father would not go along with their polices, tipped off Saddam about the impending putsch by my father and gave the names of his top aides," Nora said. "All of them died in Saddam's torture chambers."

Al Tamimi was shot dead April 12, 1994 at his apartment in Beirut's Ein El Tineh district in an assassination officially blamed by the Lebanese authorities on four Iraqi embassy diplomats, who were arrested and then released on the grounds they enjoyed diplomatic immunity, Nora recalled.

Saddam has severed Iraq's diplomatic relations with Lebanon upon the arrest of the four diplomats involved in al Suhail's assassination. Nora said the moment she was told that Saddam was arrested earlier this month she went and prayed at her father's grave in a suburban Beirut, "torn by mixed feelings of joy, sadness and wrath."

She said she plans to sue Saddam at the United Nations, before the International Court of Justice at The Hague and before the world organization of human rights. She did not say how would she be going about the legal proceedings, however.

Nora said her sister Saffia, a human rights activist, has already returned to Iraq and is currently making the necessary arrangements in Baghdad to recover the family's bank accounts and property, which were confiscated by Saddam in 1968, when her father fled Iraq.

She said the family would return to Iraq soon with the remains of her father for reburial in his native country.

Beirut, Updated 22 Dec 03, 09:26