Accounts of Brutality Roil Hussein Trial

The first witnesses to take the stand against Saddam Hussein confronted him Monday with chilling testimony about an aerial assault on their village, mass arrests, torture by electric shock, and executions after the Iraqi leader survived an assassination attempt there.

Two witnesses, men now in their 30s, stood glaring at the deposed leader a few feet away as each outlined his memory of the horrors suffered in their youth. Hussein and some of his seven co-defendants being tried in the slayings of 146 villagers repeatedly disrupted the proceedings and furiously disparaged the charges.

In the tumultuous, daylong hearing, leadoff witness Ahmad Hassan Mohammed recalled that after his arrest he peeked through his blindfold in a torture chamber and saw a machine that “looked like a grinder” with hair and blood on it.

Jawad Abdul-Aziz Jawad, who followed him to the stand, said Iraqi troops used helicopters to fire at homes in Dujayl within hours of the 1982 assassination attempt and later sent bulldozers to destroy the palm groves and orchards that were the village’s livelihood.

“There were mass arrests, women and men,” Mohammed said in a rambling, tearful account often disrupted by outbursts from the defendants. He said he was taken to a field of half-buried bodies. “I recognized them,” he said. “They were my neighbors.”

Mohammed sparred angrily with Hussein, betraying no fear of the man who once held the power of life and death over millions of Iraqis. He pressed on when the former president tried to butt in, at one point drawing a sharp rebuke. “Do not interrupt me, son!” Hussein exclaimed.

Both witnesses identified themselves on camera on the third day of the televised trial, despite the violence surrounding the case.

Two defense lawyers have been killed since the Oct. 19 opening of the trial, which has been recessed twice. Three of the five trial judges remain nameless and off-camera.

The next nine scheduled complainant witnesses have asked to testify off-camera, two of them from behind a curtain so that even those in the courtroom can’t see their faces.

Neither of Monday’s witnesses offered evidence directly linking Hussein to the slayings in Dujayl, a predominantly Shiite Muslim village 35 miles north of Baghdad that was largely populated by foes of his Sunni Arab-led Baath Party.

Instead, Mohammed painted a harrowing picture of the former regime’s dungeons as experienced by a 15-year-old boy.

He said intelligence police knocked at the door of his family’s home the day after the assassination attempt. They took him, his parents, seven brothers, four sisters and a niece to Room 63 of the Hakmiya intelligence center in Baghdad, a large hall filled with Dujayl residents.

Relatives were tortured in front of one another, he said. Interrogators used rubber hoses and acid. His brother Moshen was questioned with the aid of an electrically charged whip in front of his father, Mohammed said. It was there he recalled seeing the bloody grinder.

“If I had to describe all the torture, I would need 10 days,” he said, his voice breaking.

Seven relatives died in captivity, he said. Beaten but spared because of his youth, he was banished with others to a desert prison camp for four years.

Hussein and his co-defendants are accused of ordering or carrying out the roundup, interrogation and torture of about 1,500 villagers in Dujayl after a small group of gunmen opened fire on the presidential motorcade July 8, 1982. They are also charged with criminal destruction of tens of thousands of acres of village land.

Some of the villagers were shot dead in the immediate aftermath; most of those slain were executed without trial. The Dujayl case is the first of about a dozen being prepared against the 68-year-old ex-president and former aides by the new Iraqi High Tribunal.

Under Iraqi law, judges question each witness first and then allow the prosecution, defense lawyers and defendants, in that order, to cross-examine. The first witnesses in this trial are complainant witnesses, victims of the repression in Dujayl who were called by the prosecutor.

But in practice Monday, Judge Rizgar Mohammed Amin struggled to maintain control as defendants, witnesses and lawyers shouted at one another.

The strongest testimony in Monday’s hearing was directed against former Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan and Barzan Ibrahim Hasan, Hussein’s half brother and former head of the intelligence service.

Both witnesses placed Hasan in the village right after the motorcade attack. “He had red cowboy boots and bluejeans and a sniper rifle,” Mohammed said.

Jawad, 10 at the time, recalled seeing Ramadan in the village. He said his father pleaded with the vice president and his orchard was spared destruction.

As the testimony wore on, the former president, his aides and their lawyers began to reveal more of their defense strategy. After losing a 35-minute battle to delay the trial on procedural grounds, they attacked the credibility of both witnesses.

For the first two days of the trial, Hussein had essentially ignored the charges and used the courtroom as a political stage, clashing with the chief judge and playing to his supporters in Iraq’s insurgency.

Hussein was full of bluster again Monday. He threw down a notebook and pounded a table. He ridiculed the court as “made in America.” He told the chief prosecutor: “Hey, you in the glasses, don’t you recognize your leader of 30 years?”

He said he was not afraid to be hanged, the maximum sentence he faces. And he appeared to threaten the judge. “When the revolution of the heroic Iraq arrives,” he said, “you will be held accountable.”

But for the first time, Hussein addressed the accusations against him, defending his decision to send aides to Dujayl to investigate the attempt to kill him. “Isn’t it Saddam Hussein’s right as a president, or the right of the president of ... any other country to follow these aggressors who shot at him?” he asked the court.

Khalil Dulaimi, Hussein’s lawyer, repeatedly asked both witnesses how they could recall so many details from their childhoods. Hasan called the emotional leadoff witness a liar and yelled, “He should act in the movies!”

“I remember all this,” Mohammed responded. “I wrote it down so that people would never say it was made up.”

Monday’s hearing began with a prolonged battle over a defense motion to declare the court illegal and halt the trial until the judge issued a formal ruling on the question. The defense argues that the court has no legal standing because it was created under U.S. military occupation following Hussein’s ouster in 2003.

During the heated discussion, Amin twice declared, “This is a legitimate court!” -- a de facto ruling that the trial would continue while he considered the motion. When the defense team began a walkout, the judge agreed to permit one of the attorneys to argue the motion in court after a two-hour recess.

In turn, the defendants agreed to stay and take part in the trial, for now. It is to resume today. Former U.S. Atty. Gen. Ramsey Clark, one of three non-Iraqi advisors to Hussein’s legal team, led the walkout. After the recess he was allowed to make a statement demanding better security for the defense lawyers and their families. The judge cut him off after five minutes and ordered him to sit down.

Toward the end of the day, Iraqi and American officials controlling the courtroom’s sound system shut down the English translation briefly as Hussein invoked a Koranic verse to justify resistance to the U.S. presence: “Fight them! The lord will torture them with your hand.”

Later, officials shut down TV transmission from the courthouse, ending the session for viewers in Iraq and around the world about 10 minutes early.

Raid Juhi, the court’s spokesman, said the judge may cut off the sound at his discretion and sometimes does so for security reasons. He did not explain the shutdown of TV coverage.

Times staff writer Borzou Daragahi contributed to this report.