Former city top cop Bernard Kerik cheated death – ending his stint in Iraq just before a deadly bombing yesterday that could have taken his life.
Kerik, who was in the shadow of the Twin Towers during the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, had planned to appear yesterday at the new Iraqi police academy in Baghdad where a car bomb killed one cop and wounded a dozen others.
“I was scheduled to be at the academy to say my goodbyes,” Kerik told The Post. “At the last minute, I decided to leave a day earlier, otherwise I would have been there when that bomb went off.
“I guess you could call it fate,” he added.
Kerik said he decided to end a four-month job for the U.S. government in which he helped rebuild the Iraqi police force because he felt he had finished his work there – and missed his wife and two young daughters.
“This was a great honor,” he said. “I wouldn’t have missed it.”
Kerik plans to take two weeks off with his family and then rejoin the Giuliani-Kerik consulting firm in Manhattan.
Kerik said he thought yesterday’s blast was an attempt by Saddam Hussein loyalists to frighten the newly trained force of 37,712 officers.
“They’re not going to intimidate them,” Kerik said. “The are courageous people who have been fighting for 37 years and now they finally have a chance to win.”
Kerik said the recent spate of attacks were to be expected as Saddam loyalists stage a last-ditch effort to hold on to what they had, but he favors empowering Iraqis over sending more troops to stabilize the embattled nation.
“If you triple the number of coalition forces you’ll probably triple the attacks on the troops,” he said. “The future is not in the military but in getting control back in the hands of the Iraqi people.”
He added, “We can support them and offer assistance, but at some point they will have to do it on their own.”
As for Saddam, Kerik said intelligence reports show he is probably alive and “running like a rat.”
“He’s been minimized,” Kerik said. “He’s changing locations three to four times a day, probably riding around in the trunk of a car or the back of a van.
“He will be caught and be held accountable to the Iraqi people for his atrocities,” Kerik said.