Saddam’s Deputy Goes To Gallows

SADDAM Husseins vice-president was hanged yesterday despite protests by human rights groups that the evidence was weak and the sentence unfair.

Taha Yassin Ramadan, the highest-ranking person from Saddams government to be executed after the former president, was fearful as he was led to the gallows, said Bassam Ridha, adviser to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

"He was scared, terrified, very terrified," Mr Ridha said.

However, Mr Ridha said the hanging was not plagued by the problems that marred the executions of Saddam and his half-brother, which outraged Iraqis.

Saddams execution was captured by a mobile phone camera and posted on the internet, showing witnesses heckling him in his final moments. His half-brother was decapitated during his hanging.

The judge in Ramadans case, along with the prosecutor and the defence lawyer, witnessed the execution and the body was to be delivered to his family, Mr Ridha said.

Ramadan was convicted in November along with six others, including Saddam, for his role in the 1982 massacre of 148 Shiites in a small town north of Baghdad after an assassination attempt on the Iraqi president.

The trial court that sentenced Saddam to death sentenced Ramadan to life in prison, but an appeals court ruled the punishment was too light. The trial court then sentenced him to death last month.

Despite being a senior official in the Saddam regime, Ramadan was a relatively minor figure in the trial.

The accusations against him largely centred on his order that orchards and fields in the Dujayl area be bulldozed, and evidence was presented about his participation in meetings with other leaders who were more culpable in the massacres.

Ramadan was also the commander of a militia that was involved in rounding up the massacre victims.

Human rights groups and some government organisations, including an arm of the United Nations, have said the con- viction was the result of guilt by association and that the evidence supported conviction on lesser crimes, such as unlawful imprisonment and inhumane acts.

They opposed the execution, saying the Iraqi judiciary lacked independence from political influence and that due-process rights normally afforded to defendants elsewhere were not practised.

"The trial was riddled with flaws and didnt meet international standards," said Sara Dareshori, senior counsel with Human Rights Watch in New York.

Ramadans son, Ahmad, said his father would be buried in the area of the Iraqi city of Tikrit near Saddams burial place.

"It was not an execution. It was a political assassination," Ramadans son told al-Jazeera television by telephone from the Yemeni capital, Sanaa.

Born into a peasant family in the late 1930s, Ramadan worked in a bank before joining the Baath party in 1956 and participating in a 1968 coup that returned it to power.

He was captured in the northern city of Mosul in August 2003 by Iraqi Kurdish fighters and handed over to American forces.

LA TIMES, NEW YORK TIMES, REUTERS

Tag Cloud

External Information

Additional Information

Where Am I?