U.S. Citizen Won't Be Handed to Iraq, Federal Court Says

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Associated Press
Saturday, October 28, 2006

A U.S. citizen who was sentenced to death by an Iraqi court this month will not be handed over by the U.S. military until the Supreme Court hears his case, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday.

An Iraqi judge found Mohammad Munaf guilty of helping in the 2005 kidnapping of three Romanian journalists in Baghdad. Munaf, who was born in Iraq and became a U.S. citizen in 2000, said his trial was flawed and his confession coerced.

Since his arrest in May 2005 near Baghdad, Munaf has been held at Camp Cropper, where the U.S. military keeps high-value detainees, on behalf of Multinational Force-Iraq.

In Washington, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ruled that he has no authority to intervene because Munaf, 53, was being held by coalition military forces.

Yesterday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit also declined to step in. The court said that the military must give Munaf 10 days to appeal to the Supreme Court and wait for it to rule before transferring him to Iraqi officials.