BAGHDAD, Oct 25: A group of former foreign leaders backing the defense of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein called on Tuesday for a UN probe into the murder of an attorney working for one of his fellow accused.

Defense lawyers have also appealed for UN protection following the kidnapping and murder of Saadoun Janabi just a day after the dramatic opening of the trial of Saddam Hussein and seven former cohorts last week.

An investigation into the attack was an ‘urgent necessity’, the former foreign leaders and ministers wrote in a letter to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.

The letter emerged as Saddam’s Iraqi lawyer Khalil al Dulaimi arrived in Amman to take part in talks on coordinating defense strategy for his next court hearing on Nov 28.

Investigations by Iraqi and US officials into the murder ‘will have no credibility’, said the letter signed by former Algerian president Ahmed Ben Bella, former Malaysian premier Mahathir Mohamad, ex-French foreign minister Roland Dumas and former US attorney general Ramsey Clark.

Mr Janabi was kidnapped on Thursday - the day after Saddam and seven of his former henchmen went on trial over a massacre in 1982, and his body was found with bullets to the head dumped in a Baghdad neighborhood.

Mr Janabi, who was acting for Awad Hamad al Bandar al Sadun, a former chief judge of the revolutionary court and deputy head of Saddam’s office, was reportedly picked up by two trucks carrying armed uniformed men.

Iraqi and US leaders ‘have repeatedly expressed hostility toward the accused persons and both governments have resorted to criminal violence against supporters of the former government of Iraq’, the letter said.

The failure of US and Iraqi officials ‘to provide protection to the defense and access to the defendants requires the transfer of any trials to a legal international forum if there is to be fairness in appearance and fact’.

Saddam Hussein and his co-defendants face charges including murder and torture related to the killing of 148 people from the village of Dujail following a failed attempt on the Iraqi leader’s life in July 1982.—AFP