World Dec. 03, 2008 - 06:27AM JST ( 20 )

BAGHDAD —

An Iraqi court on Tuesday condemned Saddam Hussein’s notorious hatchet-man “Chemical Ali” to death for war crimes and crimes against humanity over the crackdown on Shiites during their ill-fated 1991 uprising.

Hassan al-Majid, 67, already on death row after being convicted of genocide for the brutal military campaign against Iraq’s Kurds in the late 1980s, listened quietly to the verdict before muttering “Praise be to God.”

Abdelghani Abdul Ghafor al-Ani, who headed Saddam’s Baath party in southern Iraq in 1991, was also condemned to death on the same charges over the uprising that followed Iraq’s crushing defeat by U.S. forces in the 1991 Gulf War.

“Down with the occupation, down with the collaborators!” Ani shouted as Judge Mohammed al-Oreibi read the verdict reached by a five-judge panel. “God be praised, I will fall as a martyr to the nation.”

Oreibi ordered Ani removed from the courtroom, saying “Get out of here, you dirty Baathist.”

The verdicts came after a 15-month trial which heard harrowing testimony from some 100 witnesses who told of mass executions and relatives being thrown from helicopters during the rebellion.

“Ali Hassan al-Majid never showed any regret,” Oreibi declared. “Neither did Abdelghani. He was always making problems. One time he bit a policeman who was trying to get him to stop shouting.”

Majid was sentenced to death in June 2007 for genocide after ordering the deaths of tens of thousands of Kurds during the 1988 Anfal campaign, when Iraqi forces strafed villages with poison gas, the source of his grim nickname.

After months of legal wrangling, Iraq’s presidential council in February approved the death sentences of Majid and two other regime officials—Sultan Hashim al-Tai, a former defense minister, and Hussein Rashid al-Tikriti, former armed forces deputy chief of operations. But they have remained on death row in U.S. custody ever since.

Tai and five other officials were sentenced to 15 years in prison for their role in the crackdown, and Tikriti and three other officials received life terms. Three defendants were acquitted.

“Those people who were sentenced to life in prison deserve to be hanged. But they apologised to the Iraqi people, and they showed regret, and some of them asked for mercy for the martyrs,” Oreibi told reporters.

As many as 100,000 people were killed around the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala and other towns and villages across the south in 1991.

Many people who joined the uprising say they had expected U.S. forces to back them, but former U.S. President George Bush instead ordered a halt at the Iraqi border, leaving the rebels at the mercy of Saddam’s forces.

“I saw with my own eyes what the Iraqi army under the former regime did to families. Today we feel that God has sent down his judgment and his justice on those criminals,” said Ahmed Nuri, 25, who was just a boy in Najaf at the time.

“It’s a great joy that the criminal Ali Hassan al-Majid will be punished. I can’t wait for the day they execute him,” added Hatem Ahmed Ali, 41.

Lua Smisam, a senior official in the political movement founded by the anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, called the verdict “divine justice” and “a victory for the blood of the martyrs and the oppressed.”

Majid, a cousin of Saddam and interior minister at the time of the uprising, was arrested by U.S. forces in August 2003.

In August 2007, an unidentified witness accused him of personally executing her two sons by tying bricks to their feet and throwing them out of helicopters into the Gulf after detaining them in March 1991.

Another witness, who also testified behind a curtain, said in September 2007 that Majid had overseen the execution of some 200 people in a sports stadium near the southern city of Basra, where troops shot them dead in batches of 25.

Majid has never denied or expressed remorse for his actions during the campaign against the Kurds, but insisted he was not in Basra during the alleged massacre.

Since the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion, experts have exhumed dozens of mass graves of victims killed in the two uprisings, and many Kurds and Shiites have expressed outrage that Majid has not yet been executed.

“I think it is silly to try someone whose crimes have been proven on more than one occasion,” said Sabah Ahmed, 32, a teacher in Najaf.

“It should be enough that his nickname is ‘Chemical Ali.’ Everyone knows where the name came from.”

Wire reports