The highest-level officer to defect from Saddam Hussein’s army disappeared from his home in Denmark on Monday under mysterious circumstances, according to family members and a Danish state official. Gen. Nizar al-Khazraji, Saddam’s former army chief of staff, was seen by some as playing an important role in a post-war Iraqi military.
KHAZRAJI’S SON, Mohammed, reached by phone in Soroe, Denmark, told MSNBC.com that his father failed to return from a walk on Monday.
“He told me he was going to have a cigarette outside,” the younger Khazraji said.
After his father failed to return, and a search around the building did not find him, Mohammed Khazraji called the police.
Khazraji, head of Iraq’s armed forces from 1987 to 1990, is fighting charges of war crimes in a Danish special court, which was investigating the general’s role in Saddam’s persecution of Iraq’s minority Kurds in the 1980s. During the campaign, Kurdish villages were destroyed and chemical weapons were used on Kurdish civilians, killing thousands.
Khazraji vehemently denied the charges.
In 1995, Khazraji, having fallen out of favor with Saddam, fled to northern Iraq and then Jordan. He survived assassination attempts — blamed on Iraqi intelligence working on Saddam’s orders — in the Jordanian capital, Amman, and later in Spain. In 1999, he sought political asylum in Denmark.
In a phone interview on March 10, the 64-year-old Khazraji told MSNBC.com that he planned to cooperate with the Danish investigation no matter how long it took. He blamed Saddam’s agents for smearing his name and fabricating information used in the Danish prosecutor’s investigation.
SEEKING ASYLUM On Monday, Khazraji’s son repeated his father’s conviction that the family was not safe from Saddam’s intelligence agents.
“My feeling is that he was kidnapped by Iraqi intelligence,” Mohammed Khazraji said.
Under the terms of the Danish investigation, Khazraji surrendered his passport and was visited by Danish police three times a week. The last police visit was on Friday, his son said.
Birgitte Vestberg, the Danish special prosecutor investigating Khazraji, said Monday that officials in Denmark had not ruled out an abduction by Iraqi intelligence officers. But she also noted Khazraji’s wish to play a role in a post-Saddam Iraq.
“We are acting on the assumption that there are at least three possibilities: He’s been kidnapped, he has fled the country or he has been unable to get home for some reason.”
Vestberg said her staff met regularly with Khazraji to question him about evidence allegedly linking him to atrocities in Iraq.
“We are investigating with great vigor,” she said. “My staff has met him quite recently.”
about his own failed attempts to overthrow Saddam in the 1990s, which he blamed on botched CIA support for the Iraqi opposition.
U.S. officials have pointed to Khazraji, widely respected among the Iraqi armed forces for his role in the Iran-Iraq war, as a candidate for a leadership position in an Iraq without Saddam.
Khazraji’s son dismissed speculation that his father had fled Denmark, whose shared borders with other European Union members are largely unguarded.
“Of course, he wants to be near Iraq,” Mohammed Khazraji said. “He wants to play his role. But he would not just leave.”
Preston Mendenhall is MSNBC.com’s international editor.