The journalist who threw his shoes at former US President George W. Bush will face trial on February 19 for assaulting a visiting head of state, with a maximum 15-year prison term, a court official said on Sunday. Muntazer al-Zaidi's defence lawyers lost an appeal to have the charges against him reduced to a lesser offence of insulting Bush, rather than assaulting him.
"The Iraqi appeals court has rejected the appeal submitted by Muntader al-Zaidi's defence lawyer to change the charges, and decided to set February 19 as the date for trial," said Iraqi judiciary council spokesman Abdul-Sattar al-Birqdar.
Al-Zaidi has been held in jail in Baghdad since hurling both shoes at Bush at a December 14 news conference during the then president's final visit to Iraq. Bush ducked the flying shoes while the journalist called him a "dog". The act, captured on television, made al-Zaidi a hero in much of the Arab world. In one tribute, an artist built a giant statue of a shoe, which was eventually dismantled, in ousted dictator Saddam Hussein's hometown Tikrit.
Iraqi law has a statute forbidding aggression against visiting leaders. Al-Zaidi's lawyers have argued that throwing a shoe could not be considered aggression because it could not cause actual harm, and was therefore only an insult.
Comments
Comments are closed.