Transfer of Saddam trial ruled out

Baghdad: Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari has ruled out transferring the trial of toppled dictator Saddam Hussein outside the country.

"The process is a purely Iraqi affair, which should take place on our territory and it is out of the question to transfer it anywhere else," Jaafari said on Friday night.

Jaafari claimed that the murder of the lawyer of a co-defendant of Saddam Hussein could be aimed at getting the trial moved out of Iraq.

"The objective of the murder was to get the trial shifted out of the country. People think that in acting in this way, they can pose a challenge to the court," he said.

The body of one of Saddam's seven co-defendant?s lawyer, Saadoun Janabi, was found with bullet wounds to the head in the impoverished northern Baghdad neighbourhood of Ur on Friday.

Janabi was kidnapped just a day after the opening of the former Iraqi dictator's trial over a massacre of Shiites.

Saddam and his co-defendants went on trial Wednesday for crimes against humanity over in 1982 when they murdered over 150 Muslim Shiites.