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.
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