Middle East News
"Chemical Ali" defiant as he receives death sentence (2nd Lead)
Jun 24, 2007, 10:23 GMT
Baghdad/Cairo - Iraq's special tribunal Sunday found five defendants guilty in the late-1980s campaign against the Kurds, sentencing three to death and two to life prison terms. A sixth man was acquited for lack of sufficient evidence.
Hassan al-Majid, a cousin of Saddam Hussein better known as 'Chemical Ali,' was sentenced to death for his role in the genocide against Kurds in the infamous Anfal (Spoils) campaign waged by Saddam Hussein's Baath regime as the Iraq-Iran War was nearing its end.
Also sentenced to death were former defence minister Sultan Hashim Ahmad and former assistant to the Iraqi army's chief of staff, general Hussein Rashid Mohamed al-Takriti.
The court served life prison terms to Sabir Abdel-Aziz al-Douri, former chief of military intelligence during the Anfal Campaign, and Farhan Motlek al-Jabouri, also a top military intelligence figure.
One defendant, Taher Tawfiq al-A'ni, who was the governor of Mosul at the time of the campaign, was acquitted for insufficient evidence.
During Sunday's session, chief judge Mohamed Khalifa al-A'ribi ordered five defendants out of court room, keeping only al-Majid, who showed his defiance against the verdict.
While listening as the judge read out the sentence, al-Majid interrupted him with shouts of 'Long live the Baath Party,' and 'Long live the glorious Iraqi army.'
The trial began in August 2006. Sunday's session was its 61st session, dedicated to sentencing the six top defendants. A total of 432 defendants are standing trial in the Anfal Case.
When the trial started, Saddam was also one of the accused, but he was hanged last December 30 on a guilty verdict from his trial for the massacre of Shiites in Dujail in 1982.
An estimated 180,000 Kurds were killed in Saddam's drive under the code-name Anfal (Spoils), when the Iraqi army allegedly carried out a scorched-earth campaign, including poison gas attacks, against hundreds of villages in the Kurdish region in 1987-1988.
During the trial al-Majid insisted on his innocence despite a mass of eyewitness, tape recordings and documented evidence against him. He said he was only carrying out Saddam's orders or else he himself would have been killed.
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-AgenturCOMMENT
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Older Talkback
page: 1
Human Being...Thank you sir!
You are the best example of human beings that i have came across!
(:-))
This 'Human Being' killed about 200,000 other human beings with poison gas.
You two are complete fools.
Just as well they weren't tried in the UK. If they had been and IF they had been found guilty they would have faced the same penalty whch violent UK offenders face - a stiff 200 hours community service order! That would have really taught them a lesson.
If this guy it is claimed 'strangled' 200,000 with his hands(I don't have any sympathy for him) may I ask 'Sick' how many civilians were murdered by his democratic regime in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and later in Vietnam.Were these mass exterminations of impoverished people not a Holocaust because their skin color was not white?
'If this guy ... 'strangled' 200,000 with his hands(I don't have any sympathy for him)'
Does that imply you do sympathize with him, not having committed the killings 'by hand'? What does that sympathy entail?
He was in plain sight the whole time.
'If this guy it is claimed 'strangled' 200,000 with his hands(I don't have any sympathy for him)'
So since he used methodologies that kept his hands from getting tired you have sympathy for him? You lied when you referred to yourself as 'human being'. You should have just called yourself 'piece of crap'.
'Were these mass exterminations of impoverished people not a Holocaust because their skin color was not white?'
They were not deliberately targeted because of their ethnicity or any other reason. Saddam tried to wipe out the Kurds because they were Kurds. You moron.
YEAH!... 'You moron'! lol
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Human BeingJun 24th, 2007 - 12:16:11
Two wrongs do not make a right.'Witch hunting' on behalf of Bush and company to divert attention from the human tragedy in Iraq. Innocent people are dying for the sins that were not committed by them but by rogue foreign 'Intelligence' organizations in the 60s,70s and 80s arming people and inciting them to kill in the name of freedom who were in those days dubbed by the Western media as 'freedom fighters' fighting the Soviets/Communists/Leftists and the Maoists and now the very same people(Voila!) have become 'dictators' and 'terrorists'.If you are looking for 'honest','credible' and 'reliable' journalism.....look no far.. the BBCs and ABCs and all that sh... is ready to brainwash you with their spin stories day in and day out.Thankfully I don't trust them!
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