The Baghdad Radio announced today that 15 men and women – two of them identified as Jews – had been convicted by a revolutionary tribunal of having been spies for Israel and the United States and would be hanged at dawn tomorrow. The identities of the two condemned Jews did not tally with that of the two Jews listed last week when Baghdad announced 12 arrests, including two Jews, Meir and Sassoun Abdou. The two Jews who will be hanged tomorrow morning were identified as Itzhak Eliyahu Dallal and Raphael Yehezkiel Yaacob. There was no indication of the fate of the Abdou brothers.
The scheduled executions are the first that Iraq has announced in several months following an international outcry over the barbaric practice of public hangings before screaming mobs. Nine Jews were hanged in this manner last January in Baghdad and Basra despite international protests and efforts at intervention.
The Baghdad regime first revealed last Tuesday that more men and women were facing death as “agents of Israel and the CIA” and Foreign Minister Abba S. Eban of Israel immediately asked United Nations Secretary-General U Thant to intervene to protect the arrested men and women and to secure the departure from Iraq of the Jews still living there in peril.
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