Well it's become clear that dissident "cleric" Moqtada al-Sadr, now holed up in Najaf and surrounded by 2,500 US Army troops is not a holy man: He's a common criminal trying to evade punishment.
According to The Weekend Austrailian:
A detailed summary of the case against Sadr, which has been obtained by The Weekend Australian, shows that the prosecuting judge, Raid Juhy, has laid a much wider range of charges against the radical cleric than was previously known.Prosecutors had announced that Sadr was charged with the murder last year of rival cleric Abdul Majeed al-Khoei, the alleged theft of religious funds from several mosques, and the murder by his guards of an Iraqi family.
But Sadr has also been charged with ordering several other murders, setting up illegal courts and prisons, inciting his followers to violence, and other breaches of the Iraqi penal code.
The barrage of charges and evidence amassed by Juhy, a Najaf-based judge, means that even if Sadr can distance himself from the killing of Khoei, he will still face serious problems in court.
The brief shows that the judge, who is responsible under Iraqi law for overseeing the gathering of evidence, has found eyewitnesses to back the charges that Sadr personally authorised the murder of Khoei, a moderate rival.
According to Colonel Mike Kelly, an Australian army lawyer serving in Baghdad as a legal adviser to the coalition forces, the first that coalition lawyers knew of Juhy’s investigation was when they heard last June that he was well advanced with the case.
“He is a very professional forensic sort of lawyer who says he doesn’t care about politics, he just wants to ensure nobody is above the law any more in Iraq,” Kelly says.
Maybe we should stop using honorifics when referring to the man and just call him Sonny.
(hat tip to The Command Post)
