Top Iraqi defector disappears

[wx247]

SULAIMANIYAH, Iraq, March 17 — The highest-level officer to defect from Saddam Hussein’s army disappeared from his home in Denmark on Monday under mysterious circumstances, according to family members and a Danish state official. Gen. Nizar al-Khazraji, Saddam’s former army chief of staff, was seen by some as playing an important role in a post-war Iraqi military.

KHAZRAJI’S SON, Mohammed, reached by phone in Soroe, Denmark, told MSNBC.com that his father failed to return from a walk on Monday.
“He told me he was going to have a cigarette outside,” the younger Khazraji said.
After his father failed to return, and a search around the building did not find him, Mohammed Khazraji called the police.
Khazraji, head of Iraq’s armed forces from 1987 to 1990, is fighting charges of war crimes in a Danish special court, which was investigating the general’s role in Saddam’s persecution of Iraq’s minority Kurds in the 1980s. During the campaign, Kurdish villages were destroyed and chemical weapons were used on Kurdish civilians, killing thousands.
Khazraji vehemently denied the charges.
In 1995, Khazraji, having fallen out of favor with Saddam, fled to northern Iraq and then Jordan. He survived assassination attempts — blamed on Iraqi intelligence working on Saddam’s orders — in the Jordanian capital, Amman, and later in Spain. In 1999, he sought political asylum in Denmark.
In a phone interview on March 10, the 64-year-old Khazraji told MSNBC.com that he planned to cooperate with the Danish investigation no matter how long it took. He blamed Saddam’s agents for smearing his name and fabricating information used in the Danish prosecutor’s investigation.


**Hmmm...**

[southerngale]

Hmmm

[Rob-TheStormChaser]

He prolly was either killed or screwed town and had enough. If I were him, I'd get the hell outta there too.

[mf_dolphin]

Might even be on the way back to Iraq.