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A grave holding 30 bodies has been found in the
garden of an opulent villa where sadistic parties
are said to have been hosted by the Iraqi general
known as Chemical Ali, writes Adam Nathan.
Police who found the grave say General Ali Hassan
alMajid, a cousin of Saddam Hussein who got his
nickname from the gas attacks he mounted on the
Kurds of northern Iraq, used to entertain house
guests with a “party game” that involved shooting
prisoners tied to metal posts in the garden.
Major Jasin Hamed Taleb, 43, a police intelligence
officer, said local farmers had witnessed several
such killings and had shown him a site in the garden
where they had seen bodies being buried.
“We had not noticed the site and it was not until
you were on it that you could smell the bodies,” he
said.
Photographs of the mass grave have been sent to
prosecutors in Baghdad to be used as evidence in al-Majid’s
trial, which is expected to begin in May. Iraqi
sources in Baghdad said the former general would
face charges in connection with the suppression of
the Shi’ite uprising in southern Iraq in 1991 as
well as the gassing of the Kurds in Halabja, in the
north, in 1988.
It has emerged that tapes of al-Majid threatening in
his distinctive high-pitched voice to cut up his
victims “like cucumbers” are likely to be broadcast
in court.
The tapes, which record al-Majid’s foul-mouthed
tirades at Ba’ath party meetings, are part of a
large body of evidence handed to prosecutors.
Al-Majid, number two in America’s pack of cards
depicting the most-wanted members of Saddam’s
regime, is heard vowing to swamp Kurdish villages
with clouds of poison gas. He says so many will die
that troops will have to “bury them with
bulldozers”.
www.thetimes.com
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