Iraq - Hussein Cousin Gets Death Sentence for Mass Killings (by John F. Burns)

The New York Times (excerpt) ^ | June 24, 2007 | John F. Burns

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Excerpt -

BAGHDAD, June 24 — As the judge pronounced five death sentences on him on Sunday, the man Iraqis know as Chemical Ali seemed a shadow of the merciless enforcer who oversaw poison gas attacks that killed thousands of Kurdish villagers in Iraq’s northern uplands nearly 20 years ago.

In his early 60s, severely weakened by diabetes, Ali Hassan al-Majid leaned heavily on a walking stick for the 18 minutes it took the judge to read guilty verdicts on counts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Unlike his cousin Saddam Hussein, whose shouted defiance nearly drowned out the judge who sent him to the gallows last year, Mr. Majid offered no protest until the judge ordered bailiffs to lead him from the chest-high, iron-ribbed cage that serves as a dock.

Only then did Mr. Majid muster a riposte, but it seemed to speak to relief that the waiting for his inevitable death sentence was over. “Thanks be to God, now I’m leaving,” he said, gruffly, as he turned to limp out of the courtroom in the old Baath Party headquarters, a place where his reputation as a man who relished handing out summary sentences to Kurds, Shiites and other accused enemies of the old regime — and then overseeing the executions himself, with a ghoulish pleasure evident in the official videos — made him almost as feared as Mr. Hussein.

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