Prosecutor Asks Death Penalty for Hussein

The chief prosecutor asked an Iraqi judge Monday to put deposed dictator Saddam Hussein to death for crimes against humanity, capping months of grim testimony over the alleged 1982 massacre of Shiite Muslim villagers.

Lead prosecutor Jaafar Mousawi also urged the death penalty for two co-defendants: Barzan Ibrahim Hasan, a half brother to Hussein and Iraq’s onetime intelligence chief, and former Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan.

“The prosecutor general requests from the court to issue the most severe punishment against them,” Mousawi told the judge in his closing arguments. “They did not have mercy on either the elderly or the children.”

The prosecutor also urged that Awad Hamed Bandar, the former head of Hussein’s Revolutionary Court who doled out death sentences against the villagers, be punished for the killings. But he did not specifically call for the death penalty.

Hussein and seven co-defendants were charged with carrying out a campaign of arbitrary arrest, torture, forced deportation and killing against the people of Dujayl, a predominantly Shiite village north of Baghdad where the former president survived an attempt on his life in 1982. Prosecutors describe a witch hunt that culminated with 148 people, including elderly residents and scores of children, being put to death without fair trials.

The prosecutor asked the judge to dismiss charges or “minimize the punishment” in the cases of four defendants. All were local officials at the time of the assassination attempt, and were described in testimony as relatively powerless figures with little choice but to follow orders from Baghdad.

Hussein broke into a broad grin and chuckled to himself as Mousawi urged Chief Judge Raouf Rasheed Abdel Rahman to impose the death penalty on him. The former president has frequently been an avid participant in his own trial. Watching the testimony unfold from the witness box, Hussein has interrupted regularly to offer his guidance to the judge or pontificate on the nature of justice.

The case is the first in a series of trials planned against the former dictator and his deputies. The Dujayl trial, which opened last fall, is scheduled to reconvene July 10 with closing arguments by the defense.

In keeping with the often sweeping historical tone of the arguments, Mousawi opened his statement Monday by invoking the hardships suffered by Iraqis under Hussein. He painted the Dujayl victims as icons of an entire nation, symbols of uncounted oppression.

“The people in the old times passed through dark times and calamities,” he said. “The people of Dujayl lived through the darkest nights, they suffered injustice and oppression. Their troubles began with the visit of Saddam Hussein to their town.”

Prosecutors have described years of retribution and collective punishment suffered by the people of Dujayl. Even the town’s farmlands and orchards were destroyed by government forces, they say. Women and children were banished into the desert.

Both prosecutors and defense lawyers have sought to justify their position by painting opposing versions of Iraq’s past.

The defense team has tried to downplay the punishment of the people of Dujayl by portraying the brutality as self-protection carried out by a threatened government. The lawyers have pointed out that Iran and Iraq were at war at the time of the assassination attempt and have accused the Shiite-led government in Tehran of collaborating with Iraqi Shiites to kill Hussein.

By invoking Iranian involvement and directing sharp accusations at Iraq’s Islamic Dawa Party, a onetime opposition group that is at the center of Baghdad politics in the new, Shiite-dominated Iraq, defense lawyers have tried to portray the violence as a justified act of war.

Defense lawyers also have disputed the number of dead, contending that some of the 148 victims named are still alive.

Each side has accused the other of paying cash to witnesses in exchange for conveniently twisted narratives.

The prosecution has dismissed the assassination attempt as a few bullets fired by renegade gunmen. At times, prosecutors and their witnesses have even contended that there was no attempt on Hussein’s life, that the shots came from villagers firing their guns in the air to celebrate the president’s visit.

“The alleged assassination attempt against Saddam involved only eight to 15 bullets fired from behind a wall,” Mousawi told the judge Monday. “It was proved there were no heavy weapons. If it had been an assassination attempt, it would have been a suicide mission.”

The people were caught under a brutal and relentless regime, prosecutors said. Some of the people didn’t live long enough to be formally executed, Mousawi said, because they were tortured to death in prison.

The prosecutor reviewed documents alleging that intelligence officers met to discuss the punishments of the villagers. He traced signatures and telephone conversations into the highest reaches of Iraq’s government at the time, listing documents that appeared to indicate Hussein knew what had happened to the people of Dujayl.

“The court procedures at the time that followed, were they applied legally?” Mousawi asked. “The procedures pursued were cruel and harsh.”

Times staff writer Borzou Daragahi contributed to this report.