Saddam accused in court of gas attacks

BAGHDAD - An Iraqi Kurd told Saddam Hussein's genocide trial on Tuesday how jets dropped poison gas smelling of rotten apples on his mountain village and aides to the ousted leader defended his campaign against Kurdish rebels.

Taking the stand in Baghdad on the second day of the second capital trial the former president has faced, first witness Ali Mustafa Hama said: "Birds were returning to their nests. I saw eight to 12 jets patrolling the sky. There was greenish smoke from the bombs. There was a smell of rotten apple or garlic.

"People were vomiting," he said. "We were blinded. We were screaming. There was no one to save us, only God."

During cross-examination, defence counsel asked how he could tell the aircraft were Iraqi and prompted Hama to say that he had helped shelter guerrillas in his village. Saddam himself challenged the witness, asking: "Who told you to say this?"

Two of Saddam's former military commanders, among six fellow defendants charged with war crimes, had earlier been allowed to make brief statements in their defence, in which they portrayed the 1988 Anfal - Spoils of War - campaign as a legitimate response to Iraqi Kurds fighting alongside Iran against Baghdad.

"The Iranians and Kurds were fighting hand in hand against the Iraqi forces," former military intelligence chief Sabir al-Douri said, recalling Saddam's 1980-88 war against Iran's then new Islamist rulers, in which he had tacit US support.

In a pointed remark going to the heart of sectarian tension around the trial of Saddam's Sunni-dominated secular regime, Douri recalled telling a friend he would never be prosecuted for his actions at that time "unless Iran occupies Iraq".

Many minority Sunni Arabs portray the rise to power of the Shi'ite Muslim majority following the US overthrow of Saddam as an occupation by Shi'ite Islamist Iran, prompting critics to question whether Saddam and his aides can have a fair trial.

Saddam and his cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, are charged with genocide over the seven-month campaign. Majid earned his nickname "Chemical Ali" after poison gas attacks in the north.

Hama, one of several witnesses to be presented by the prosecution to lodge a formal complaint against the defendants, spoke of events nearly a year before the formal launch of the Anfal campaign, in the Balisan valley north of Sulaimaniya.

Died at birth

Speaking in Kurdish and wearing a headdress, Hama, in his early 50s, recalled April 16, 1987: "There were two women. One of them was pregnant. When she gave birth, the little infant was trying to see the world. He breathed in the chemicals and died."

Unlike many witnesses in Saddam's first trial, for crimes against humanity over the killing of 148 Shi'ite men from Dujail, Hama did not try to conceal his identity from the man who ruled Iraq through fear for three decades.

But when asked whom he held responsible, he did not name Saddam and referred only to "the person who was ruling Iraq".

On Monday's opening day of the trial, at least one defence lawyer spoke through a distorting microphone and did not appear on television. Three defence counsel in the Dujail trial have been killed, prompting accusations of sectarian persecution.

Saddam refused to plead and called the court a tool of the occupation. The Shi'ite judge entered a not guilty plea for him.

Trying to prove the campaign amounted to genocide of Iraq's Kurdish minority, prosecutors said villages had been razed and villagers forced into camps and shot, tortured or raped. They said on Monday there were over 180,000 victims.

A verdict in the Dujail trial is expected in October.

The 69-year-old former leader faces the death penalty in both cases, but a dozen other trials could delay any execution for years, raising the possibility that like former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam may die in jail.

- REUTERS