BY: SINAN SALAHEDDIN | AP ARABNEWS

BAGHDAD: Former bodyguards for Iraq’s fugitive vice president have testified that they were ordered to kill security officials and plant roadside bombs as a politically charged terror trial against the Sunni leader got under way.

Vice President Tariq Al-Hashemi, who was in Turkey but faced trial in absentia, has denied all charges against him. If convicted, he could face the death penalty.

The case threatens to paralyze Iraq’s government by fueling simmering Sunni and Kurdish resentments against Shiite Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, who critics claim is monopolizing power. Al-Hashemi is an ardent critic of Al-Maliki, whose government issued a warrant for the vice president’s arrest the day after US troops left Iraq last December.

Al-Hashemi has been accused of playing a role in 150 bombings, assassinations and other attacks from 2005 to 2011, according to the judicial council. The Iraqi government alleges that Sunni death squads were largely composed of his bodyguards and other employees.

The charges against the vice president span the worst years of bloodshed that followed the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq as retaliatory sectarian attacks between Sunni and Shiite militants pushed the country to the brink of civil war. He has been in office since 2006.

Tuesday’s testimony focused on more recent years, when violence ebbed but insurgents continued to attack security forces and other targets in a bid to undermine the Iraqi government in the run-up to the US withdrawal in December.

Bodyguard Odai Ghazi Amin, who served in the Iraqi army under Saddam Hussein, said he joined Al-Hashemi’s staff in 2008 and was ordered by the vice president’s son-in-law in 2009 to escort bomb-planting missions on roads across Baghdad.

In 2011, Amin said he was told to assassinate an army general and a lawyer — orders he tried to avoid by asking for a job transfer. But he said he was threatened by the son-in-law, who ran Al-Hashemi’s office, that he would be killed and his family in danger if he refused the deadly missions.

Last September, Amin testified, he was summoned to meet with the vice president.

“Al-Hashemi told me that he is going to assign me to kill some officers who work against the interests of the state and to carry out operations on security checkpoints,” Amin said.

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