Iraq's former Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz made his first public appearance in three years on the stand for Saddam Hussein yesterday, calling on the court to try current leaders for attacks on the state in the 1980s.

Aziz, the highest profile witness for Saddam in his trial for crimes against humanity following a failed assassination bid in 1982, was once the international public face of the toppled leader's government and one of his closest aides.

He tried to turn the tables around in the trial that started in October by accusing one of the parties now in power, the Islamist Shi'ite Dawa party of new Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, of trying to kill him and Saddam in the 1980s.

Maliki's national unity government of Shi'ites, minority Sunni Arabs and Kurds took office last Saturday on a pledge to rein in guerrilla and sectarian attacks plaguing Iraq three years after the US-led invasion.

In new violence highlighting the challenge the tough-talking Maliki faces, gunmen shot dead a police general in Baghdad and tribal clashes south of the capital killed 16, police said.

Denmark's Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the second Western premier to visit Baghdad this week after Britain's Tony Blair, said Iraqi security forces were making progress and that foreign troops would leave as soon as they could take over.

Saddam and seven co-defendants are accused of reprisals, including the killings of 148 Shi'ites, in the town of Dujail after an attempt to assassinate Saddam in 1982.

If convicted they face death by hanging.

Referring to a separate hand grenade attack targeting Aziz at a Baghdad university in 1980, the former deputy premier said:

"I'm a victim of criminal acts committed by a party presently in power now. Try them ... They killed dozens of students."

Aziz, a long-time ally of Saddam but not among the accused at the trial, said the assassination attempt in Dujail was part of a series of operations targeting officials and civilians and Iraqi authorities had every right to crack down on the Dawa.

"Weren't the killings at Mustansiriya University a mass killing?" Aziz asked the court. "And now you are judging officials, accusing them of mass killings."

Aziz, whose family says he is seriously ill, was number 43 on the US most-wanted list of Iraqi officials when he gave himself up in April 2003.

Source: China Daily