Son of Iraq’s former Deputy PM demands release of his father for “humanitarian reasons.”

BAGHDAD / IraqiNews.com: Ziad Tareq Aziz, the son of Iraq‘s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister during Saddam Hussein’s regime that fell down after the country’s occupation by the U.S. and Britain in 2003, has called for the release of his sick father, who he said he was threatened by death due to his illness, for “humanitarian reasons,” according to the Blumberg Satelllite TV Station on Friday. “My father may not live for more than two or three months,” Ziad told the TV Station by telephone from Amman, adding that Tareq Aziz, 74, had suffered from three heart attacks over the past 8 years he spent in Baghdad prisons, and can’t easily speak or walk, adding that his family had sent him medicine, but he did not make sure he had taken them or not. Iraq‘s High Supreme Court, formed to try leaders of the former Baath Regime, had sentenced Tareq Aziz with execution, charging him with having carried anti-human crimes for his alleged role to “follow up Islamic parties during the previous regime,” including the Islamic al-Daawa Party, to whom Iraq‘s current Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki belongs. But Iraq‘s President, Jalal Talabani, had refused to pass the death sentence, along with demands by the Vatican, Russia, Greece, the UN and the European Union, who have objected the execution, due to Tareq Aziz‘s age and deteriorated health condition. Ziad had called the Iraqi government to release his father, describing it as a “humanitarian initiative,” hoping that Maliki’s government would have “mercy” towards his father, describing such a decision to be similar to the decision to release Abdul-Basit al-Migrahi, who suffered from cancer and was released and returned to Libya in 2009, after he was imprisoned in Scotland, under charges of having been behind a Pan-American plane explosion in 1988 in Scotland. FH (A) / SKH 3