The Dutch intelligence service employed as an informant and helped hide a Dutchman suspected of selling materials for chemical weapons to Iraq's Saddam Hussein, a daily newspaper reported Monday. The suspect was arrested on Dec. 6 and faces charges of helping Saddam commit war crimes and genocide by supplying him with chemical agents that were used to make weapons. Citing unidentified sources, De Volkskrant said the public prosecution's earlier attempts to arrest the man had failed as the Interior Ministry provided him with a "safe house" normally used for people who need protection such as witnesses. The AIVD intelligence service wanted information from the man on Saddam's weapons program, the paper said. The AIVD declined to comment on the newspaper report. The public prosecution service said it was not relevant for the case against the suspect. | That depends on when he became a informant, before or after he sold Sammy the chemicals. |
The suspect was detained in Milan in January 1989 following a U.S. request but he was released after two months. He then fled to Iraq where it is thought he stayed until the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 when he returned to The Netherlands. Krista van Velzen, a parliamentarian for the opposition Socialist Party, said there seemed to be a conflict of interest between the AIVD intelligence service -- which reports to the Interior Ministry -- and the justice authorities. "The AIVD wants to protect him, the forces of law want to sue him," she told De Volkskrant. "There was apparently a political decision to protect someone suspected of crimes as terrible as genocide. This is a threat to the rule of law." The Socialist Party has requested an emergency debate in parliament on the matter, the earliest possible date for which would be Tuesday -- the last day parliament convenes before it goes into recess until Jan. 17. The man, who has not yet been formally charged, was ordered into temporary detention for 30 days by a court earlier this month. A prosecution spokesman expected his temporary detention to be extended to the maximum 100 days. He is suspected of complicity in genocide over Iraq's use of chemical weapons in the 1980-1988 war against Iran and against the Kurdish population in northern Iraq, including the notorious attack on the town of Halabja in 1988 in which an estimated 5,000 people were killed. |