Baghdad, Iraq (CNN) -- Saddam Hussein's cousin Ali Hassan al-Majeed -- also known as Chemical Ali -- was executed Monday, an Iraqi government spokesman said.He was hanged after having been convicted on 13 counts of killings and genocide, Ali al-Dabagh said.
Al-Majeed (pictured) had been sentenced to death in four separate trials, including one that focused on his involvement in a poison gas attack against Iraqi Kurds that killed about 5,000 people.
His execution had been delayed for political rather than legal reasons. It is not clear what change, if any, led to the reported execution.
Al-Majeed had been held in United States custody since his capture in 2003. But he was handed over to the Iraqi authorities in the 24 hours before his execution, U.S. Ambassador Christopher Hill told CNN's Diana Magnay on Monday.
The 1988 poison gas attack on the village of Halabja, which earned al-Majeed his nickname, was part of the Anfal campaign, in which the Hussein regime killed at least 100,000 Iraqi Kurds. The campaign is believed to be worst poison gas attack on civilians ever.
Al-Majeed was sentenced to death separately for his role in putting down a Shiite uprising against Hussein in 1991, and for his part in putting down a Baghdad revolt in 1999.
Estimates of the Shiite death toll in the 1991 rebellion range from 20,000 to 100,000. Al-Majeed was convicted of playing a key part in the slaughter during the revolt in southern Iraq that followed the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
One of his co-defendants in the Anfal case, Sultan Hashem, is a prominent Sunni leader who is considered a key player in efforts to reconcile the country's once-dominant Sunni community with the Shiite majority that now wields political power.
Hashem was also sentenced to death, but Iraq's Sunni Arab Vice-President Tariq al-Hashimi has long refused to sign his execution order. That delayed the execution of al-Majeed and another defendant as well.
Iraqi law requires all three members of the Iraqi presidency council -- the president and two vice-presidents -- to sign execution orders. It does not say what happens if they do not sign.
Chemical Ali executed for Halabja massacre
Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam Hussein's henchman who was better known by his nickname of Chemical Ali, was executed today according to an Iraqi government spokesman.
The hanging was carried out 8 days after Majid was sentenced by an Iraqi court for crimes against humanity for ordering a gas attack that killed about 5,000 of his Kurdish fellow countrymen in the town of Halabja.
Majid, a close cousin of Saddam, already faced the death penalty after 3 other cases. His execution had however been deferred because of disagreements within Nouri al-Maliki's Shia-led government over the sentencing of his fellow defendants.
After Majid was sentenced to death for a 4th time last Sunday he was told by government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh that his execution would take place "very soon."
It was Mr al-Dabbagh who confirmed today that the sentence had been carried out. "The condemned Ali Hassan al-Majid has been executed by hanging until death today," he said in a statement.
Majid earned his nickname for ordering poisonous gas attacks in a brutal scorched-earth campaign of bombings and mass deportations that killed an estimated 182,000 Kurds in the 1980s.
Like Saddam, he hailed from the northern town of Tikrit, where he was born in 1941, according to court documents, although he told a tribunal last year that he was born in 1944.
Considered Saddam's right-hand man, and bearing a strong resemblance to the former dictator, he was a member of the decision-making Revolutionary Command Council and was regularly called upon to crush rebellion.
The henchman was most infamous for his role in northern Iraq. In March 1987, the ruling Baath party put him in charge of state agencies in the Kurdish area, including the police, army and militias.
As Iraq's 8-year war with Iran was drawing to a close, fighters from the rebel Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, with backing from Tehran, took over the farming community of Halabja near the border.
In March 1988, Iraqi air force jets swooped over Halabja, and for 5 hours they sprayed it with a deadly cocktail of mustard gas and the nerve agents Tabun, Sarin and VX. An estimated 75 % of those killed were women and children, in what is now believed to have been the worst gas attack ever carried out against civilians.
New York-based Human Rights Watch has said Majid was responsible for the deaths or disappearances of around 100,000 non-combatant Kurds when he put down the revolt across the Kurdish region in what became known as the Anfal campaign. But Majid said he ordered the attacks against the Kurds, who had sided with Iran in the war, for the sake of Iraqi security, and refused to express remorse.
After Iraqi troops swept into Kuwait in August 1990, Majid was named governor of the occupied emirate, which the regime considered Iraq's 19th province. As in the north, he swiftly and viciously annihilated resistance.
Tens of thousands of people died when Saddam's forces, driven out of Kuwait by a US-led coalition after their 1990 invasion, put down the Shia uprising in a bloodbath that saw heavy shelling of southern Iraqi towns.
Later, in 1999, Majid ordered troops into Shia areas to stop protests after the assassination of revered Shia cleric Mohammed Sadeq al-Sadr, after whom Sadr City is now named.
For 15 years Majid did not travel abroad, fearing arrest on war crimes charges. But as the US-led invasion of Iraq loomed in January 2003, he left the country for the 1st time since 1988, visiting Syria and Lebanon in a bid to whip up regional support for Iraq.
He was thought to have been killed by coalition bombing of his villa in Basra after the invasion in April 2003, but US officials were later forced to admit that he was still alive. He was captured that August, 5 months after coalition forces invaded Iraq.
Majid has remained alive and in custody for years longer than his leader Saddam, who was executed in December 2006 for crimes against humanity over the killing of 148 Shia men and boys after a 1982 assassination attempt.
Majid was condemned in June 2007 to hang for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes over the Anfal campaign against Kurds.
He received a 2nd death sentence in December 2008 for war crimes committed during the ill-fated 1991 Shia uprising in southern Iraq.
And in March last year, the Iraqi High Tribunal handed down a third death sentence over the the 1999 murders of dozens of Shias in the Sadr City district of Baghdad and in the central shrine city of Najaf.
Majid had also been accused of displacing and killing about 2,000 clansmen of Kurdish regional president Massud Barzani.
About 290,000 people disappeared in Iraq under Saddam's rule from 1979 to 2003, according to Human Rights Watch. The Iraqi High Tribunal was set up after the 2003 US invasion to try former members of his government.
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