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'Dr Germ' and 'Mrs Anthrax' released from Iraqi jail 19/12/2005 - 12:48:51 Notorious Saddam-Hussein-era officials have been released from jail in Iraq and some have already left the country, an Iraqi lawyer said today. A legal official in Baghdad said between 24 and 25 top former officials in Saddam Hussein’s government have been freed, including Rihab Taha, known as Dr Germ, and Huda Salih Ammash, known as as Mrs Anthrax. The Iraqi lawyer, Badee Izzat Aref, said some of those released were his clients. “The release was an American-Iraqi decision and in line with an Iraqi government ruling made in...

US sets Saddam's scientists free Huda Ammash was educated in the US Eight former aides to Saddam Hussein - including two women accused of making biological weapons - have been released from US custody in Iraq. The freed detainees no longer pose a security threat, a US spokesman said. They include Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash, nicknamed by the US "Mrs Anthrax" and Rihab Taha, also known as "Dr Germ". Reports have been circulating of a pre-election deal to free former regime figures in order to appease Iraq's Sunni Arabs, correspondents say. A US military spokesman in Baghdad said eight detainees...

BAGHGAD, Oct 19 (Reuters) - The judge who will preside over the trial of Saddam Hussein on charges of crimes against humanity was named on Wednesday by U.S. officials, shortly before the trial opened, as Rizgar Mohammed Amin. Amin, an ethnic Kurd in his late 40s from the northern city of Sulaimaniya, had previously confirmed his role privately to reporters. He was named in an information sheet handed to reporters at the courtroom by U.S. officials. Four other judges will sit alongside him. Iraq's Kurds were oppressed for decades during Saddam's rule, and the toppled Iraqi leader is expected...

The pledge by the United States to the Iraqi people is to replace dictatorship with democracy, fear with freedom. Yet the man the United States has put in charge of Iraq, the Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, is accused of the cold-blooded murder of up to six young men just days before he took power. The accusation has not been lightly made and cannot easily be swept aside. The allegations against Dr Allawi were first aired in this newspaper in a story by our chief correspondent, Paul McGeough, an experienced, highly regarded journalist with extensive first-hand experience in Iraq. The report...

Three Ugandan artistes have landed top roles in The Last King of Scotland Hollywood movie. They are Mr Abbey Mukiibi, who starred in the genocide film Sometimes in April and is a theatrical star with Afri-Talents, Mr Stephen Rwangyezi and Mr Sam Okello Okello both of whom have starred in the war movie War Stories and are leaders of the acclaimed Ndere Troupe. The trio will star opposite US actors Forest Whitaker (who will play Amin), Kerry Washington, James McAvoy and Gillian Anderson. Washington, who will star as one of Amin's wives starred as Ray Charles' wife, Della in the...

Palestinian security forces in Ramallah on Monday arrested a suspect in the murder of Samir Rantisi, a local journalist and spokesman for former PA Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo. Rantisi, 42, had for years urged Palestinians to endorse non-violent methods in their confrontation with Israel and was strongly opposed to suicide bombings. He was murdered early Monday morning while he was sleeping in his bedroom in the Sateh Marhaba neighborhood. A lone gunman who broke into his apartment in the Shkukani Building shot him twice in the head in front of his wife. The wife managed to identify the suspect,...

President Yoweri Museveni said in a statement that Uganda must become financially independent of donor nations that provide about half its budget but which he said are partly to blame for many if its problems. Museveni has often hit out at donors for giving "unsolicited" advice, and says that by exporting their bountiful raw materials for processing in the West, African nations are the real donors. "The raw materials that we have been donating to the Western countries must be turned into final products," he said in the statement, saying there were international markets for Ugandan coffee, cotton, cereals, beef,...

Suspected dissidents disappear after midnight visits to their homes; chilling screams can again be heard from Idi Amin's infamous torture chambers, reopened after a quarter of a century of disuse. From the few that escape come tales of punishment beatings and even mass executions. Welcome to President Yoweri Museveni's Uganda. One of Britain's favourite African states in recent years has, almost unnoticed in the West, become a sinister land where a corrupt regime uses its secret police to rule through fear. The reasons for this transition are not hard to fathom. Mr Museveni has ruled Uganda since 1986, when his...

Indonesian police arrest Hambali keyman JAKARTA (Indonesia) - Indonesian police have arrested a key associate of alleged South-east Asian terror mastermind Hambali on an island in the country's far north-east, Koran Tempo newspaper reported on Wednesday. Adrian Ali, alias Amin, was arrested on Tinakareng, in the north Sulawesi province, after police found equipment used to make identity papers in his house, the paper quoted local police as saying. Two other suspects were arrested with Ali. The report did not say when the arrests took place, nor what the men would be charged with. Tinakareng lies just south of the Philippine's...

<p>He's dead. That's good. He died cheating the hangman, in exile bankrolled by autocrats with petrodollars. That's very bad.</p> <p>Idi Amin, the sadist and mass murderer who ran Uganda from 1971 to 1979, died in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, shortly after his son made a global plea for a kidney transplant to save the old thug. What the elder Amin deserved was a transplant to a jail cell.</p>

The sole interview granted to a journalist by dictator Idi Amin after the daring Israeli commando raid to rescue the hostages being held in Entebbe, Uganda, was given to this writer on the night of July 3-4, 1976. I recalled the occasion when Amin died this week in exile in Saudi Arabia. In the light of the Saudis' involvement in financing terrorist organizations under the illusion of buying insurance for the preservation of their corrupt royal house it was hardly surprising that they gave asylum for over 25 years to one of the cruelest dictators post-colonialist Africa has known. During...

Revealed: How Israel helped Amin to take power 17 August 2003 When Radio Uganda announced at dawn on 25 January 1971 that Idi Amin was Uganda's new ruler, many people suspected that Britain had a hand in the coup. However, Foreign Office papers released last year point to a different conspirator: Israel. The first telegrams to London from the British High Commissioner in Kampala, Richard Slater, show a man shocked and bewildered by the coup. But he quickly turned to the man who he thought might know what was going on; Colonel Bar-Lev, the Israeli defence attaché. He found the...

Former president Mr Idi Ami Dada is dead. Amin, 78, passed away at exactly 7 a.m. Ugandan time on Saturday. Sources said that Amin's latest wife, whom he married a few months ago, was at his bedside when he died. Her name was not disclosed. Amin's family members in Kampala declined to comment on the death of the former leader. They said one of his sons, Mr Jaffer Amin working with DHL courier company, is the only one authorised to talk about his father's death. Amin had been in a coma at King Faisal Specialist Hospital in the Red...

KAMPALA (Reuters) - Former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin was buried on Saturday in the Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah, where he had earlier died in hospital after being critically ill for weeks. "He is buried. The family decided and we have buried him in Jeddah," Ali Amin told Reuters by telephone from his home in Jinja, 50 miles east of the Ugandan capital Kampala. An official at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Jeddah where Amin died told Reuters his body had been taken out for burial in the Red Sea city. One of Africa's bloodiest despots, Amin had...

JEDDAH (Reuters) - Former dictator Idi Amin, blamed for the murder of tens of thousands of Ugandans in the 1970s, died on Saturday in a Saudi hospital where he had been critically ill for weeks, a senior medical source said "We can confirm that Mr Idi Amin has died from complications due to multiple organ failure," the source at King Faisal Specialist Hospital in the Red Sea city of Jeddah.

Fox is quoting AP as saying that Idi Amin has died.

"We can't help you. Go home and die" is what President Bush said in his State of the Union Address many people with AIDS in Africa are told when they seek medical aid for their disease. The AIDS pandemic in Africa has sharply lowered the life expectancy of nations as entire regions are depopulated by a disease that has spread like wildfire. When I was living in South Africa in 1991-1992, AIDS was not even known to exist and the average life expectancy was 61 years for males and 67 years for females. By 1999, in only six years, the...

<p>There is new hope that slowing the spread of AIDS in Africa, where an estimated 30 million people are dying from the disease, may be as simple as ABC.</p> <p>ABC stands for "Abstinence, Be Faithful, or use Condoms," in that order of emphasis. It is also what public health experts call the program begun in Uganda in 1986, when HIV infections and AIDS began washing over Uganda's citizens like a plague. Many Western experts derided the project when it began, but today it is considered the brightest success story in the course of the pandemic.</p>

JEDDAH, Aug 2 (Reuters) - Former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, blamed for the murders of tens of thousands of Ugandans in the 1970s, is in "near-death condition" at a hospital in Saudi Arabia, a medical source said on Saturday. "He is alive but remains in a near-death condition in a coma," the source at King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Jeddah told Reuters, adding that Amin was on a ventilator. Amin came out of a coma last week and was said then to be in serious condition.

JEDDAH: The condition of former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin is still serious but improving, medical officials in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia have said. "He came out of coma on Wednesday and is no longer using an artificial respirator. But he is still in intensive care and his condition is still serious," a hospital source told Reuters news agency. AFP news agency were told a similar thing by another unnamed source. The hospital had announced that Mr Amin might not survive after he went into a coma last week. Medical staff at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital told BBC that they would...