"Chemical Ali" will not be hanged yet, Iraqi judge says
DPA | October 17, 2007
'Chemical Ali' and two other prominent members of the regime of former president Saddam Hussein will not be executed 'within the next few hours' as had been previously reported, a judge from the supreme Iraqi tribunal told Iraqi media.
The Iraqi side 'did not yet receive the accused' who are held in a US-administered detention facility, Judge Mounir Haddad told Voices of Iraq (VOI) news agency in statements published Wednesday.
Ali, whose full name is Ali Hassan al-Majid, is accused of crimes against humanity along with the ex-dictator's former defence minister, Sultan Hashim, and the former deputy commander of operations of the Iraqi army, Hussein Rashid.
Al-Majid, Saddam Hussein's paternal cousin, was sentenced on June 24, 2007 to death over the 1987 ethnic cleansing campaign against Kurds in Anfal where as many as 180,000 Kurds perished in a chemical weapons attack. That sentence was upheld by an Iraqi appeals court early September.
During the past few weeks, reports had said that al-Majid would face the gallows immediately following Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim feast to mark the end of the holy month of Ramadan, which occurred on Sunday for Iraq's Sunnis and Monday for the Shiites.
The latest report quoting another judge had said that al-Majid was to be executed on Tuesday anytime after 5 o'clock, but the execution did not take place.
In accordance with Iraqi law, al-Majid should have been hanged within 30 days of the approval of his sentence.
Chemical Ali earned the much-feared nickname because of the use of mustard gas in his deadly operations on Kurdish villages.
In addition to the Anfal attack, Chemical Ali is undergoing another trial over the crushing of a Shiite uprising after the first Gulf War of 1991.
Saddam himself was put to death in December 2006 for crimes against humanity in the infamous Dujail case.
He was executed on the first day of the Muslim feastof Eid al- Adha, which was a cause of controversy.
The event had sparked much criticism from many Arabs after a video of the execution was leaked, and then later when another showing Saddam's corpse lying on a stretcher, red blotches on his cheek and a bloody clot on his neck, circulated on the internet.
