ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Tariq al-Hashimi, former vice president of Iraq and a prominent Sunni leader who was convicted of murder and later sentenced to death under former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, was reportedly taken off of Interpol’s red notice list on Monday. Hashimi, a Sunni and former Iraqi vice president, received multiple death penalties on terrorism charges in an absentia trial in December 2011 under the previous Shiite-led government of then Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Hashimi had insisted that he was innocent and that the terrorism charges against him were politically motivated. He escaped to the Kurdistan Region, and then to Qatar before settling in Turkey. Interpol’s investigation committee has reportedly announced that there were suspicions about the information given against Hashimi and, therefore, it was decreed that Hashimi should be removed from the red notice list. "The Interpol decree is evidence that charges the Iraqi authorities accused me of in order to sentence me [to death] were not accurate," Hashimi has said, quoted by news agencies. The Interpol red notice for Hashimi represented an international alert to all of Interpol’s 190 member countries to seek their help in locating and arresting him, following the issue of a national arrest warrant by Iraq’s Judicial Investigative Authority as part of an investigation in which security forces seized bomb-making materials and arrested other individuals. Following accusations of involvement in the bombing of the Iraqi Council of Ministers in 2011, Hashimi reportedly tried to escape to the Kurdistan Region. Days after the withdrawal of US troops in Iraq, Maliki’s government began arresting prominent Sunni politicians and dissidents under anti-terrorism and de-Baathification laws, which deepened the sectarian divisions between Sunni and Shiite factions in the country.
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