“We’re facing daily threats and these threats prevent us from going to our offices and the court and from interviewing the witnesses,” lead counsel for the lawyers, Khalil al-Dulaimi, told the Reuters news agency.
Adel Mohammed Abbas, referred to in other reports as Adil al-Zubeidi, was shot dead while driving in a car with fellow defence lawyer, Tamer Hammud Hadi, who was injured in the attack.
The shooting came less than three weeks after the abduction and murder of Saadun Janabi, the defence representative for the former deputy of Saddam’s office and ex-chief judge of the revolutionary court, Awad Ahmad al-Bandar.
Mr Janabi was killed on October 20, the day after the trial began on charges the eight men orchestrated the 1982 massacre of 148 Shi’ite villagers in Dujail.
His death brought a suspension of the trial until November 28, however, resumption of hearings later this month has been thrown into doubt amid renewed opposition to the proceedings.
Lawyers oppose tribunal
Mr Dulaimi said that the defence lawyers had called on “the international community, the UN Security Council, the United States and all of those involved, to work on scrapping the (Iraqi Special Tribunal) criminal court as illegitimate, and to pressure it to release President Saddam Hussein and his legitimate leadership team.”
In a statement, the defence team said the tribunal had “no reason for being and has no judicial or legal basis” and that the ousted president and his government should be ‘freed’ “so that they may regain the ability to exercise their constitutional rights.”
A spokesman for Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari has rejected suggestions that the trial should be conducted abroad, instead urging the lawyers to take up a government offer of protection.
“Justice must follow its course and we must guarantee the conditions for a just and transparent trial,” Leith Kubba said.
Fresh violence across Iraq
North of Baghdad, near Baquba, at least five Iraqi police officers were killed in a suicide car bombing, Iraqi army and medical sources reportedly said.
A professor of medicine was shot dead in the Shi’ite holy city of Najaf.
The first time insurgents have killed a leading academic in the region a colleague said.
In the capital, a driver working for the Sudanese embassy was fatally wounded in the west of the city.
Sudan’s foreign ministry spokesman, Gamal Mohammed Ibrahim, said the man appeared to have been “caught in an exchange of fire between gunmen while he was filling his tank at a gas station” and was not deliberately targeted.