UNITED NATIONS -- A UN human rights investigator called on Iraq on Tuesday to halt political killings and abrogate recent decrees providing for the amputation of hands, feet or ears, and branding with the letter X as punishments.


In a report on human rights in Iraq, former Netherlands foreign minister Max van der Stoel listed three recent cases of alleged political killings.


They involved an Iraqi exile dissident, Sheikh Talib Al-Suheil Al-Tamimi, shot dead in Beirut last April allegedly by two members of the Iraqi embassy in Lebanon; German journalist Lissy Schmidt, shot dead with her Kurdish bodyguard in northern Iraq, also in April; and Shiite leader Mohammed Taqi Al-Khoei, killed in a purported road accident in southern Iraq in July.


Van der Stoel, a special rapporteur of the UN Human Rights Commission, said Iraq "has a long history of terrorist activities, not just within its own territorial jurisdiction, but beyond, as the Al-Tamimi case evidently demonstrates."


"Such political killings constitute not only a gross violation of the individual victim's human rights, but, by means of terrorism, they constitute a gross violation of the human rights of entire groups of people and, indeed, the population as a whole."


Regarding cruel and unusual punishments, the rapporteur cited recent decrees by Iraq's Revolution Command Council providing for the amputation of the right hand for certain offences, the left foot for a repeat offence, and for the punishment of army deserters or anyone sheltering them by the cutting off of an ear.


Van der Stoel said a military physician who recently fled government-controlled Iraq testified that, because the decrees were retroactive, several hundred deserters and evaders already under detention were awaiting mutilation.


"The doctor further testified that the numbers of operations were so many as to require civilian doctors to be brought to prisons to perform the operations rather than have large numbers of persons brought to hospitals."


Concerning the right to food and health, severely affected by UN sanctions imposed after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, van der Stoel said Baghdad continued to refuse to take advantage of 1991 Security Council resolutions permitting the sale of some oil in order to buy food and medicine.