BAGHDAD, 29 November 2005 — A defiant Saddam Hussein yesterday exchanged angry words with the presiding judge and heard testimony from the first prosecution witness as the trial of the former Iraqi dictator resumed after a 40-day break. After barely two hours in session, the court was adjourned to Dec. 5 to give time for one of Saddam’s seven co-defendants to appoint his own defense lawyer.
The hearing was held amid unrelenting insurgent violence. Three British nationals of Indian origin were killed when a bus packed with Shiite pilgrims came under fire in southern Baghdad. Saddam, who faces charges including murder and torture that carry the death penalty, showed no sign of toning down the combative stance he adopted at the first hearing in October.
Iraq’s one-time strongman and his co-defendants, who all pleaded not guilty to charges over a 1982 massacre of Shiites, also watched video testimony from a witness who gave evidence from a prison hospital before his death.
Dressed in a smart Western suit with a white handkerchief neatly folded into the top pocket, Saddam engaged in an angry opening skirmish with Judge Rizkar Mohammed Amin over his treatment at the high-security Baghdad courthouse, set up in the former headquarters of Saddam’s Baath party.
He complained he had been forced to walk the stairs into the courtroom as the lift was broken and had been put in handcuffs on the way to the court, making it hard for him to carry a copy of the Qur’an.
He then lambasted US security staff for confiscating his pen and paper, saying: “How can a defendant defend himself if they take even his papers and pen?” The Kurdish Amin — who as in the first hearing appeared unflappable in the face of Saddam’s verbal jousts — promised he would tell the guards to return the papers.
But Saddam said “don’t tell them, order them. You are an Iraqi, you have sovereignty, they are in your country, they are foreigners, they are invaders.”
The charges relate to the killing of 148 men and youths from the Shiite village of Dujail, north of the capital, after Saddam escaped an assassination attempt there in 1982.
The other defendants include Barzan Ibrahim Hassan Al-Tikriti, Saddam’s half-brother and a former director of the feared Mukhabarat intelligence service, and former Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan, one of the regime’s “enforcers.” Tikriti asked the judge to be transferred to hospital to treat his cancer.
“I was examined three months ago and diagnosed with cancer,” he said, accusing the judge of ignoring his plea for medical treatment, a move he said was “tantamount to murder.”
The judge denied having received any letter from Barzan.
Ramadan refused the court-appointed defense lawyers named to replace his own, gunned down at the time of the opening of the trial, and specifically demanded that one be allowed to come from Lebanon.
The court, which appointed lawyers for two other accused, rejected a defense counsel request for a 30-day postponement, but accepted to recess until Dec. 5 instead.
The court was shown testimony from wheelchair-bound Waddah Ismail Al-Sheikh, a former intelligence official, who told of how a dozen men, hiding in an orchard, had set an ambush for Saddam’s convoy.
Some who escaped into the orchard after the attack were gunned down by Saddam’s bodyguards, he said.
Barzan then ordered troops to spread out through the town where they rounded up some 400 people, men, women and children, including entire families, Sheikh said.
