Death penalty for three Saddam-era spies
Iraq's High Criminal Court on Thursday sentenced to death three Saddam Hussein-era spies convicted of assassinating the father of a sitting Iraqi lawmaker in Beirut in April 1994.
Two other men, military intelligence chief Saber Duri and Saddam's secretary Abdul Hamid Mahmoud, were sentenced to life imprisonment at the conclusion of the trial, which began in October 2009.
Sabawi Ibrahim Hassan, the executed dictator's half-brother, and Saddam's deputy prime minister Tareq Aziz were acquitted in the trial.
The convictions came over the murder of Sheikh Taleb al-Suhail al-Tamimi, head of the Banu Tamim tribe, who fled Iraq for the Lebanese capital with his family after a Ba'ath party coup in 1968.
He later attempted his own coup against Saddam, who rose to power in 1979, but was gunned down outside his Beirut home on April 14, 1994.......