Posted on 06/24/2007 10:59:20 AM PDT by shield
BAGHDAD — Saddam Hussein's cousin and two other former regime officials were convicted Sunday of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced to hang for the brutal crackdown that killed up to 180,000 Kurdish civilians and guerrillas two decades ago.
Two other defendants were sentenced to life in prison for their roles in the 1987-1988 crackdown, known as "Operation Anfal." A sixth defendant was acquitted for lack of evidence. Death sentences are automatically appealed.
The most notorious defendant was Saddam's cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as "Chemical Ali" for ordering the use of mustard gas and nerve agents against the Kurds, who had allegedly collaborated with the Iranians during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War.
Al-Majid, once among the most powerful and feared men in Iraq, stood trembling in silence as Judge Mohammed Oreibi al-Khalifa read the verdict against him and imposed five death sentences.
"You had all the civil and military authority for northern Iraq," al-Khalifa said. "You gave the orders to the troops to kill Kurdish civilians and put them in severe conditions. You subjected them to wide and systematic attacks using chemical weapons and artillery. You led the killing of Iraqi villagers. You restricted them in their areas, burned their orchards, killed their animals. You committed genocide."
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
I know that happened but he wasn't in that group that hung soon after saddamn.
Hangin’s too good for ‘im. Burnin’s too good for ‘im. He should be torn into little bisty pieces and buried alive!
Don’t know what took so long either. CNN (blah) just said he was GOING to be hung - not that it had already occurred.
Iraqi justice will prevail and won't take long to follow thru on the death sentence ... have you forgotten what happened to Saddam?
Naaa ... they need to crank up the shredder over at Abu Gahrib(sp?) prison. The one Saddam used frequently on people who fell out of favor with him.
Radio station KNX 1070 in LA had this on the news, but spent all their time waxing poetic, describing Ali as a poor, pathetic old man who shuffled into court and who said thanks be to Allah when the sentence was read. Their sympathy for him was disgusting.
Someone should send them this video:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=-n09KT2g-Lk
Its an old clip when he was still in power, telling his officers “killing 25 million Iraqis no problem”
Well worth watching for anyone still having some doubts about this criminal.
Baghdad, Sept 7, (VOI) – Three of the six defendants in the Anfal case will be executed by hanging on Saturday, a Saudi newspaper quoted the lawyer of former Iraqi deputy premier Tareq Aziz as saying.
"The Iraqi Criminal Court notified Ali Hassan al-Majid, alias Chemical Ali, former defense minister Sultan Hashim and former chief of staff Hussein Rashid al-Tikriti that they will be executed tomorrow," lawyer Badie Aref Ezzat told Saudi newspaper al-Watan, published on Friday.
The lawyer said he was told by the three convicts that they only wanted to meet their families before the executions.
Ezzat said that officials from the U.S. embassy in Baghdad had held a meeting on Wednesday to discuss the problem of lack of approval by the presidency council for the death sentences.
He did not indicate the outcome of the meeting. The Iraqi court found guilty five of the six defendants in the Anfal case and acquitted only one.
Death sentences were handed down against Chemical Ali, the cousin of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, Hashim and Tikriti after they were found guilty of committing genocide against ethnic Iraqi Kurds.
Saber Abdul-Aziz al-Dori, director of the former military intelligence, and Farhan Motlak al-Juburi, chief of the former intelligence in the Northern Zone, received life sentences. Former Mosul Governor Taher Tawfiq al-Aani was acquitted.
Anfal was an anti-Kurdish campaign led by the former regime between 1986 and 1989 and involved a series of military campaigns against the Kurdish Peshmerga fighters as well as the mostly Kurdish civilian population of southern Kurdistan.
Independent sources estimate there were 50,000 to more than 100,000 deaths in the campaign, in which chemical weapons were used, while Kurds claim about 182,000 people were killed.
Iraq's Criminal Court heard the case of the Anfal (or Spoils of War, taken from Surat al-Anfal in the Qur'an) campaign.
Charges against the prime defendant Saddam Hussein were dropped after his execution on December 30, 2006, four days after an appellate body upheld a death sentence by the court considering the case of al-Dujail, a small town in northern Baghdad.
The court had found Saddam and a number of his aides guilty of responsibility for the killing of 148 people following an attempt on Saddam's life in 1982, during the eight-year Iraq-Iran war.
On April 2, 2007 the chief prosecutor in the Anfal case urged the court to release al-Aani, extenuate a sentence for Dori and to hand down death sentences against the four others.
http://66.111.34.180/look/english/article.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication=4&NrArticle=54582&NrIssue=2&NrSection=1
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