If the death sentence imposed on two Iraqi Jews in Baghdad were carried out, “it would shock the conscience of the civilized world,” Roger Baldwin, chairman of the Board of the International League for the Rights of Man, declared in a letter today to Abdullah Bakr, Iraqi Minister to the United States.
The two defendants, Shalom Saleh Shalom and Yusuf Ibrahim Basri, were convicted Nov. 5, 1951 of throwing a bomb at the United States Information Center on March 19, 1951. Several persons were injured. An Iraqi appeals court confirmed the death penalty last month.
Pointing out that information coming exclusively from Iraqi sources showed that the men were convicted under procedures contrary to Iraqi law, Mr. Baldwin, for many years executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, stated that “these facts, if true, constitute an obvious miscarriage of justice, and certainly would not appear to justify a death sentence.”
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