Hussein Trial Adjourns Until October Verdict

07/27/2006

By PAUL VON ZIELBAUER
NY Times
Published: July 27, 2006

BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 27 — The nine-month trial of Saddam Hussein and seven other former officials for crimes against humanity adjourned today with closing arguments from the final two defendants. The chief judge, Rauf Abdel Rahman, said that he and four other judges will announce their verdict, which portends the strong possibility of death by hanging for Mr. Hussein, on Oct. 16.

The former Iraqi dictator and the seven others, mostly high-ranking officials of his Sunni Arab-led government and military apparatus, are charged with orchestrating the execution of 148 men and boys in the mostly Shiite village of Dujail nearly a quarter-century ago.

Mr. Hussein was not in the courtroom today, having made his final arguments on Wednesday through a court-appointed lawyer that he personally repudiated. Mr. Hussein’s regular defense lawyers have boycotted the trial since July 10 to protest his treatment and the legitimacy of the proceeding.

The trial concluded on a day when more than 50 people were killed or found dead in Baghdad and gunmen in military uniforms stole the equivalent of $650,000 from a private local bank.

A car bomb and a rocket attack that caused the collapse of a small shopping mall in Baghdad’s relatively peaceful Karada neighborhood killed 32 people this morning and wounded 101 others, an Interior Ministry official said.

The robbery took place shortly before noon here, as men wearing Iraqi military uniforms and driving military vehicles halted the bank’s armored car in the middle of Baghdad, bound the drivers and security guards, and drove away with one billion Iraqi dinars, an Interior Ministry official said.

The robbery occurred as Iraq and the United Nations announced a new agreement today to tackle corruption and create a more stable environment for foreign investment.

The two defendants in court today to present closing arguments were Taha Tassin Ramadan, a former Iraqi vice-president under Mr. Hussein, and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, former chief justice of the Revolutionary Court, which ordered the Dujail executions. Mr. Bandar, looking frail and arguing the most inconsequential of points with Judge Rahman, gave a closing apologia that lasted more than two and a half hours.

Several times the judge ordered him to “be quiet” and to sit down after outbursts that typified the behavior of many of the defendants, including Mr. Hussein, since the trial began.

Iraqi procedural law, on which the Dujail trial operates, requires that the judges be satisfied that “proof to a moral certainty” exists showing a defendant’s guilt, said Mike Newton, a Vanderbilt University law professor and expert in international criminal law who trained the Iraqi High Tribunal judges now deliberating the eight defendants’ fate.

Mr. Newton, who has followed the trial from the courtroom here, said the court-appointed lawyers representing Mr. Hussein and other defendants in recent weeks have been exemplary.

“Their arguments were very capable and very comprehensive, they were focused on the details on the case,” he said. “I think they were very effective arguments, from a defense perspective.”

Regardless of the verdict and sentence the judges impose in this case, Mr. Hussein and six other former government officials are scheduled to stand trial for killing at least 50,000 people in eight military operations in 1988 in the mountainous Kurdish region. Mr. Hussein and one of his most feared former lieutenants, Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as Chemical Ali, are also charged with genocide in this case.

The court moved to its deliberations on a day when violence in Baghdad surged again, with dozens alone killed after a rocket smashed into a two-story mall downtown and, one block away, a car bomb planted in a Chevrolet sedan blew it to pieces and destroyed several street-level businesses nearby.

Nineteen bodies were also found in Baghdad today, the police said, all showing signs of torture. In the Baladiyat neighborhood, near the vast Shiite slum known as Sadr City, gunmen kidapped five traffic police officers, Iraqi officials said.

The car bomb and rocket attack in Karrada, a religiously mixed commercial center that is considered unusual here because people feel safe enough to walk by themselves unarmed, bore the signs of a Sunni insurgent attack. The attack prompted Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who had stopped in Jordan on his way back from the United States, to issue a statement specifically condemning it.

“These attacks committed by the murderers of women and children are a new evidence of their bankruptcy, malignancy and defeat,” Mr. Maliki’s statement said. The daylight robbery by men appearing to wear Iraqi Army or police uniforms was brazen even by Baghdad’s increasingly lawless standards, and raised further questions about the actions of rogue elements working for the nation’s security forces. The cash was being transported by a convoy of vehicles for Warka Bank for Investment & Finance, a private bank with headquarters here, the Interior Ministry official said.