(Update below)

The New York Times reports: The vice president of Iraq, a prominent Sunni Muslim, was convicted of murder and sentenced to death on Sunday in a trial conducted in absentia. The verdict coincided with a wave of bombings and insurgent attacks that claimed at least 100 lives, making Sunday one of the bloodiest days in Iraq since American troops withdrew last year.

Together, the verdict and the violence threatened to deepen an already intractable political crisis among the country’s ruling factions.

Sunni leaders who support the vice president, Tariq al-Hashimi, responded angrily to the court’s action, accusing the Shiite-led government of trying to sideline them from a power-sharing arrangement meant to guard against the sectarian violence that continues to plague the country.

Attacks were reported in at least 10 Iraqi cities on Sunday, including Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad, where two markets, a restaurant and a crowded square were struck, capped by a car bomb that exploded late in the evening in Sadr City, a Shiite stronghold in the capital. The attacks underscored the increasing potency of insurgent groups in Iraq, which appear to have blossomed amid the political paralysis that followed the American departure. Their attacks have tended to come in coordinated waves across the country, including the attacks by Sunni extremists on July 23 that killed more than 100 people and appeared to reflect a spillover of sectarian strife from neighboring Syria, and the car and roadside bombings of Aug. 16 that killed about 100, including dozens at an amusement park in eastern Baghdad.

Earlier this summer, the country seemed to be moving toward a sense of normalcy, with an easing of checkpoints in the capital, new buses going into service and women returning to local cinemas. But the mounting insurgent violence has prompted the government to reimpose security measures and has revived a sense of siege in some cities. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports today: The vice president of Iraq, a prominent Sunni Muslim who was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in a trial conducted in absentia, denounced the verdict on Monday as “false and unjust,” depicting the court’s finding as “an acquittal, confirming my innocence.”
[…]
Sunni leaders who support the vice president, Tariq al-Hashimi, responded angrily to the court’s action, accusing the Shiite-led government of trying to sideline them from a power-sharing arrangement meant to guard against the sectarian violence that continues to plague the country.

Speaking in Arabic in a televised news conference in Turkey, where he is in self-exile, Mr. Hashimi declared: “For me, this verdict is an acquittal, confirming my innocence.”

“All the accusations set against me are false and unjust,” he said, referring to the verdict as politically-inspired and saying that he was prepared to be tried by “a just court, but never at a court, which is under the influence of” Prime Minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a Shiite. Mr. Hashimi urged his followers to remain calm and eschew armed struggle against their adversaries. He described himself as “a symbol of all oppressed, when hundreds of thousands of people remain in prisons.”