[JURIST] A judge from the Iraqi town that is the focus of the ongoing Saddam Hussein trial [JURIST news archive] was abducted by gunmen Wednesday. Dujail Judge Walid Ahmed was kidnapped from his car on the highway between Tikrit and Samarra, according to an Interior Ministry source. It is unclear whether the abduction was related to the trial. Last week, the 22-year-old son of a top Iraqi judge, along with two of his bodyguards, was killed by gunmen [JURIST report] in Baghdad, and well over a dozen other Iraqi jurists and lawyers involved in the constitutional drafting process, in the trial of Saddam Hussein, or simply working in dangerous areas of the country have been murdered in the last couple of years since the US-

Hussein is on trial in Baghdad for a crackdown against Shiites in Dujail following an assassination attempt in 1982, including the execution of 148 townspeople. Hussein and his co-defendants could receive the death penalty if convicted of crimes against humanity for overseeing the killings. AFP has more.