Tariq Aziz, the jailed former deputy prime minister...

Tariq Aziz, the jailed former deputy prime minister to Saddam Hussein, told his son he faced the death penalty after being accused over massacres in 1979 and 1991.
The claim, in a letter sent by the former iraqi foreign minister to his son from jail, was the first time details of the charges had been made public. His son, Ziad Tariq Aziz, branded the accusations ''baseless''.
The charges, dating from 1979, appeared linked to killings of 22 Ba'ath party members allegedly involved in an anti-government plot shortly after Saddam took power. In 1991, his regime brutally repressed uprisings by Kurdish and Shi'ite Iraqis. ''Of course, according to the Iraqi penal code, the punishment for those two counts is death,'' Aziz wrote from prison.