Dutch court convicts chemicals merchant on genocide charge

A Dutch court convicted a chemicals merchant of complicity in the genocide of Kurds in Iraq and today sentenced him to 15 years in prison.

Frans van Anraat, 63, was not in the courtroom when he was sentenced for selling Saddam Hussein’s regime the materials for a lethal gas used against Kurdish villages in the 1980s.

The case is the first concerning the killing of thousands of Iraqi Kurds with chemical weapons.