Saddam Hussein was executed more than three years ago but the dictator's shadow hangs over Iraq's election, with hundreds of candidates barred over alleged links to his outlawed Baath Party. The fierce row over their exclusion has dominated the campaign for Sunday's vote and sparked accusations that Iraq's 'de-Baathification' programme was being used for political advantage. At the centre of it all is Ali al-Lami, executive director of the Justice and Accountability Committee (JAC) which has barred around 500 candidates from the polls. Controversially, he himself is running in the poll. 'The JAC decisions have been made according to the law,' the 46-year-old father of six insisted. 'Some of them (the barred candidates) are Baathists, and others are working as spies,' he told selfnews. 'All of them are dangerous.' Lami was speaking in the Baghdad home of his friend Ahmed Chalabi, chairman of the JAC, a parliamentary candidate, and the man whose faulty intelligence on weapons of mass destruction spurred the United States to invade Iraq in 2003. He said that on January 1 his committee received from the election commission a list of the names of all 6,500-odd candidates in the poll with the request that their pasts be checked to see if they had any part in the Sunni dictator's oppression of his people. It cross-checked the names with three databases, whose details he did not specify, and built dossiers of candidates' alleged links to the Baath Party, said Lami, who like Chalabi is running on the Iraqi National Alliance slate. Within 10 days, a list of 511 names had been compiled. Twenty-eight have since been reinstated, but political parties have largely either withdrawn the remaining candidates or replaced them with new names. Lami noted that two-thirds of the names on the list were from the majority Shiites, while the remaining third were Sunni. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki quickly embraced the JAC's findings, saying that only 'criminals' and 'murderers' would be affected. Iraq, he added, had 'no intention of reconciling with those who regard... Saddam as a martyr,' referring to the December 2006 hanging of the toppled Iraqi president for crimes against humanity. The row over the bans dominated the election campaign, raising questions about the JACs legal status, the judiciarys independence, the electoral commissions credibility and the ultimate fairness of Sunday's vote. Saleh al-Mutlak, leader of the Sunni National Dialogue Front and the most prominent candidate barred, condemned the JAC, saying last month: 'This is the coup de grace of the political process and the suicide of democracy in Iraq.' Diplomats and analysts have complained of a lack of transparency in the process which led to the bans. They fear the controversy might dissuade some Iraqis from voting. The process has also heightened political tensions in a country which was engulfed by deadly sectarian violence in 2006 and 2007, and comes as the US is set to withdraw half of its troops by the end of August. Lami dismisses charges of a conflict of interest. 'What we do is just like the minister of interior or the minister of education. They also check candidates to make sure they meet requirements,' he said, referring to rules which state that would-be MPs must have completed secondary school and have no criminal record. 