Asia

Home page

Asia

Another death sentence for Iraq’s ’Chemical Ali’

11 March 2009 13:32 (UTC +04:00)

Baghdadâ€“APA. "Chemical Ali," whose real name is Ali Hassan Majid, had previously been convicted and sentenced to death for the killings of tens of thousands of Kurds in northern Iraq in the late 1980s, and for a 1991 crackdown on Shiites in southern Iraq.
Ali Hassan Majid gets his third execution order. Tariq Aziz, the former deputy prime minister, was acquitted in the 1999 crackdown on Shiite Muslims.
Monday’s execution order seemed routine to both judge and defendant in the courtroom of the Iraqi High Tribunal, which is hearing Hussein-era cases. Majid stood droopy-eyed in the defendant’s wooden enclosure, a gray mustache shadowing his small, down-turned mouth. The judge announced the guilty verdict and sentence, then tersely rapped his red folder on the desk as if straightening a deck of cards.
"Thank you, thank you again," Majid said sarcastically as the judge walked out.
Another high-profile defendant, Tariq Aziz, the former foreign minister and then-deputy prime minister, was acquitted in the case, which stems from the Feb. 19, 1999, death of Ayatollah Mohammed Sadeq Sadr, a leading voice of opposition to President Saddam Hussein. Government agents allegedly were the killers of the Shiite cleric and two of his sons. A surviving son, cleric Muqtada Sadr, has emerged as the most prominent Shiite opponent of the U.S. presence in Iraq.