Another delay in Saddam Hussein's trial

BAGHDAD -- The court trying Saddam Hussein abruptly called off yesterday's session, asserting that some witnesses and complainants were away on pilgrimage to Mecca and did not show up.

Tribunal spokesman Raed Juhi announced the delay after a four-hour wait for yesterday's scheduled session to start. The court is set to reconvene Sunday, Juhi said.

He refused to say who the missing witnesses and complainants were, or why the court waited past midday to delay the hearing. The trial has been plagued by months of delays and postponements.

A new judge has been designated to lead the tribunal overseeing the trial of Hussein, an Iraqi judicial official said yesterday.

Raouf Rasheed Abdel-Rahman will temporarily replace outgoing Chief Judge Rizgar Mohammed Amin, according to the chief investigator in the case, the Associated Press reported. Amin submitted a letter of resignation earlier this month after receiving criticism for his handling of the case, in which he had allowed disruptive outbursts by Hussein and his codefendants.

On Sunday, a Western diplomat told reporters that Iraqi judicial officials were trying to talk Amin out of quitting, and his resignation has not been formally accepted. Abdel-Rahman, who like Amin is a member of the Iraqi Kurd minority, was transferred from a tribunal handling other cases against Hussein and senior members of his government.

Amin's departure was the latest in a series of troubles for the Hussein trial, during which another judge had resigned and two defense lawyers were assassinated. The diplomat said the trial, focusing on the killing of at least 140 people in the town of Dujail after an assassination attempt against Hussein in 1982, would end by May at the earliest.

Miranda Sissons, an international humanitarian law specialist with the International Center for Transitional Justice in New York, said Abdel-Rahman was not well known. She added that the changes on the bench and the threats to the security of trial personnel were raising concerns among legal experts.

''Trials have to have a sense of consistency and security in order to have integrity," Sissons said.

In other developments, the German government said two German engineers were kidnapped yesterday and a special crisis team was sent to Iraq to deal with the matter.

Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said Berlin was doing ''everything in our power so that we not only receive information, but the hostages will be returned to us safely." German media said the pair worked for Cryotec Anlagenbau GmbH, a manufacturing and engineering company involved in Iraq since before the 2003 war. The hostages, both from Leipzig, worked at an Iraqi state-owned detergent plant, near the oil refinery in Beiji, 155 miles north of Baghdad. Police Captain Falah al-Janabi said gunmen using two cars and wearing military uniforms pulled the Germans out of a car while they were heading to work.

US authorities said three US service members had been killed.

Two airmen died Sunday in the town of Taji, just north of Baghdad, when a roadside bomb struck their convoy. A soldier was killed by a roadside bomb while on a foot patrol in southwest Baghdad.

Military authorities withheld details of the explosions until the service members' relatives could be notified.

The US military reported that insurgents in Iraq had mounted more than 34,000 attacks last year on US and other foreign troops, Iraqi security forces, and Iraqi civilians, a jump of nearly 30 percent from 2004, according to the Reuters news service. US officials stressed that the effectiveness of insurgent attacks had declined.

Separately, Lieutenant Colonel Guy Rudisill, a spokesman for detainee affairs, said the cases of some of the women now in US custody in Iraq would be presented to review boards. Insurgents have demanded the release of all detained women in Iraq as a condition for freeing Jill Carroll, an American freelance reporter abducted Jan. 7. At least eight women are said to be in US custody.

Material from the Associated Press was included in this report.