AFP,  Rome, Nov 26, 2010  – Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini will ask Iraqi authorities during a visit next month for ’a gesture of clemency’ against the death sentence for Saddam-era minister Tareq Aziz, a spokesman said Friday.
’Frattini will ask for a gesture of clemency for Tareq Aziz’ during his visit on December 5, his spokesman, Maurizio Massari, told reporters.
Aziz, 74, was handed the death penalty on October 26 for the suppression of Shiite religious parties in the 1980s.
Iraq’s supreme criminal court found the long-time international face of former president Saddam Hussein’s regime guilty of ’deliberate murder and crimes against humanity’, sentencing him to death.
In poor health and among Saddam’s few surviving top cohorts, Aziz has been in prison since surrendering in April 2003, shortly after the fall of Baghdad in the US-led invasion of Iraq.
Aziz, who was born to a Christian family, was foreign minister and deputy prime minister under Saddam who was executed in 2006.