dubai • Iraqi former deputy prime minister Tareq Aziz wants to live in Rome after his release from jail, believing he will be welcomed in the Italian capital, an Arab newspaper reported yesterday.

Aziz’s plans were revealed by his lawyer in Baghdad last week, the pan-Arab newspaper Asharq Al Awsat said.

“I want to live in Rome. The Pope and Italian officials welcomed me,” Aziz said in answer to a question about his future hopes delivered via his lawyer.

Aziz was the only Christian member of Saddam Hussein’s cabinet and frequently met Pope John Paul II and his close advisers, the last time in mid-February 2003, barely a month before the beginning of the US-led invasion of Iraq.

The 71 year old surrendered to US troops in Iraq in April 2003. Since then he has been imprisoned at Camp Cropper, a holding centre near Baghdad international airport.

Aziz is suspected of involvement in the execution of dozens of members of the former Baath regime in 1979 and mass killings of Shi’ites and Kurds in 1991, but his legal representatives say he has yet to be charged.

Earlier this month, he was brought to the High Tribunal to give evidence against defendants in the Anfal trial of Saddam aides charged with involvement in the killing of up to 182,000 Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980s.

Aziz’s lawyer, Issam Al-Ghazawi, said he expected his client to be released within two to three months when the Anfal trial was completed and he was no longer needed to testify.

Saddam was executed last December after being found guilty of crimes against humanity in a previous trial, but the Kurdish genocide trial is continuing with several of his former allies still in the dock.

Then Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was a key US-ally in the invasion of Iraq despite popular opposition, but his centre-left successor Romano Prodi has since withdrawn Italian troops from the country.

Meanwhile, a policemen suspected of killing 70 Sunni Arabs in Iraq this week have been rearrested after being freed to mourn their relatives killed in a truck bombing in the same town, police said yesterday.

On Tuesday, gunmen believed to off-duty policemen, went on a rampage killing Sunni Arabs in the town of Tal Afar after a truck bomb killed 85 people in a Shiite district.

A group of policemen was briefly detained but later released to mourn the deaths of their relatives from the suicide truck bombing.