He was born in 1937 in Baghdad from a
Sunni Arab background. al-Najim was the regional command chairman for the
Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party for East Baghdad. He was accused by US Army officers of helping Saddam Hussein plot assassination attempts He was convicted in 1959 of the attempted assassination of Prime Minister
Abd al-Karim Qasim and was sentenced to death, although Qassim pardoned Najim. Following the
invasion of Iraq by the
United States and allied forces in 2003, he was depicted as the
four of clubs in their deck of
most-wanted Iraqi playing cards. His assets were frozen under
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1483 as a "senior official" and transferred to the
Development Fund for Iraq. He was captured by Kurdish
peshmerga near
Mosul in April 2003. He was held at a prison located in
Kadhimiya Region. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and confiscation of all his property on October 26, 2016. He was released from prison in April 2023. ==References==