Press TV

Ahmad Chalabi, a veteran Iraqi politician who frequented the country’s political scene in senior posts in the 2000s, has died of a heart attack in the capital, Baghdad, at the age of 71.

Haitham al-Jabouri, the secretary of the Iraqi parliament’s financial panel, said Chalabi had been found dead in his bed in his Baghdad home on Tuesday.

Chalabi was a vocal opponent of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Iran offered its condolences on the death of the former Iraqi official with the Iranian deputy foreign minister for Arab and African affairs saying that Chalbi's had always campaigned for the unity of Iraq.

"Due to his awareness of the malicious plots of enemies, Chalbi wholeheartedly employed all his political struggles in the path of Iraq's independence and national unity," Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said.  

Chalabi spent decades in the US and the United Kingdom in exile. He returned to his country after Saddam’s downfall, which came about with the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In March that year, former US President George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq under the pretext that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). In October 2004, however, a US Central Intelligence Agency report revealed that he did not have any active WMD program at the time of the invasion.

Chalabi served as the interim oil minister and deputy prime minister in 2005 and 2006.