BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s feared aide Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as "Chemical Ali," joked and flirted in a Baghdad hospital as the capital fell before making his escape, hospital officials said on Thursday.
U.S. forces bombed Majid's home on April 5 in the southern city of Basra during the war to oust Saddam Hussein, and British and American officials expressed confidence at the time that he had been killed.
U.S. defense officials said this month Majid, a cousin of Saddam, might still be alive. Majid is listed as Number 5 on the U.S. list of 55 most wanted Iraqis.
Officials at the Nursing Home Hospital said the emergency room, busy throughout the war, looked even more crowded around midnight on April 9, the day Baghdad fell.
"I was awakened at night and told that there was someone in the emergency room. I walked there and looked up and there was Ali Hassan al-Majid sitting on a stretcher next to two bodyguards," the hospital's former director, Abdel Aziz al-Bayaa, told Reuters.
"They (the bodyguards) both had shrapnel wounds. One was slightly wounded and the other had a serious injury."
BUNIA, Congo (Reuters) - Most days in the east Congo town of Bunia, Red Cross workers pick up their shovels and go to bury the latest corpses in a grassy verge by the side of the road.They are victims of a war in Congo that rights groups say has killed more civilians than any other since World War II, mostly through war-related hunger or disease. When the verge is full, the diggers will have to find new graves.
Now help is on the way from a French-led multinational force, mandated to protect civilians from clashes between the Lendu and Hema tribes in Bunia. But aid workers say that if there is to be lasting peace in Congo, a much bigger, stronger peacekeeping effort is needed.
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But there are many questions about what the new temporary force can achieve, limited as it is to Bunia town. Even if it secures Bunia, what will be done about the fighting in the outlying countryside? And what happens when they leave?