BAGHDAD -- After a year of incarceration, Saddam Hussein met a defence lawyer yesterday, the second step in as many days toward putting key members of Iraq's former Baathist regime on trial before the country's crucial Jan. 30 vote.

A day after the election campaign kicked off, an unidentified lawyer spent four hours with the 67-year-old former dictator at his undisclosed detention site, according to the head of the deposed president's legal team.

"He was in good health and his morale was high and very strong," Ziad al-Khasawneh said. "He looked much better than his earlier public appearance when he was arraigned a few months ago."

With the election barely six weeks away, Iraq's interim government has been pushing to get the trials for Mr. Hussein and his former lieutenants under way as soon as possible. Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi has said the procedures could begin as early as next week, starting with Mr. Hussein's notorious right-hand man, Ali Hassan al-Majid, better known as Chemical Ali.

But with a new government on the horizon, the move has raised eyebrows, even within Mr. Allawi's cabinet.

"Trials as symbolic as those against the dignitaries of the former regime should start only after the establishment of an Iraqi government with ballot-box legitimacy," Justice Minister Malik Dohan al-Hassan told the Geneva daily newspaper Le Temps.

The issue of when to begin the trials is just one of the many ripples emanating from the election, hailed as a critical step by the interim government's U.S. backers.

Chief among the problems is the raging insurgency, which could scare voters from polling stations and boost militant groups' claims that the election is illegitimate.

Yesterday, insurgents killed 10 people, including a government official gunned down in Baghdad and three refugees slain by a rocket attack in northern Iraq. In Ramadi, west of the capital, militants told journalists they had shot and killed an Italian citizen after he tried to break through a guerrilla roadblock on a highway, reportedly killing one gunman in the process.

An Italian passport and Lebanese residency permit the gunmen displayed identified the man as Salvatore Santoro, whom embassy officials identified as an aid worker helping Iraqi children.

Wednesday, a bomb attack at a Karbala shrine that is one of Shia Islam's most holy sites killed seven people and injured a prominent cleric.

Many analysts worry that violence in the largely Sunni areas surrounding Baghdad will depress voter turnout in those areas, producing a government weighted toward their Shia rivals and pushing more Sunnis to join violent resistance groups.

"Fundamental issues such as power sharing should be resolved before the elections, and the electoral law drawn up accordingly. It would be very dangerous for elections to legitimize a situation where one of the Iraqi factions is marginalized," said Nadeem Shehadi, a Middle East expert at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in Oxford, England.

The early days of the official campaign period have shown few signs of the public electioneering common in other countries. There have been no eager volunteers distributing leaflets door to door, little public political debate, few television commercials. Nervous Iraqi officials even convened a meeting this week to urge local reporters to avoid inflammatory comments in their stories.

"There are threats against the voter-registration people; there are threats against the voters," said Abdullah Bayati of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni group that has long urged a six-month delay before the vote. "People are afraid to participate."

But Kurds and Shiites believe they will emerge triumphant in any fair vote, and insist that the election must take place before Mr. Allawi's government expires Jan. 30.

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