Saddam defence accuses prosecution of dirty tricks

Saddam Hussein’s former intelligence chief was pulled out of the court by guards today in a stormy argument with the judge after the defence accused the prosecution of putting a perjured witness on the stand and trying to buy another witness.

Defence lawyers stepped up their attempt to undermine the entire prosecution case in Saddam’s seven-month-old trial, demanding all its witnesses be re-examined to determine whether they were telling the truth.

The lawyers also said all prosecution documents should be reviewed if it turns out that some Shiites the defendants are accused of killing are still alive.

Tension in the court grew when one defence witness, testifying from behind a curtain, claimed that chief prosecutor Jaafar al-Moussawi tried to bribe him to testify against Saddam over a crackdown launched against Shiites in the town of Dujail in the 1980s.

The witness said he and his father were arrested in the Dujail crackdown, but released. He said that in 2004 he met al-Moussawi and recounted his story. Al-Moussawi “told me: ’This testimony will not serve the Iraqi people. We want to sentence Saddam to death.'"

“He gave me $500 (€389.40)…He told me to say that my father was arrested and killed in detention,” the witness said.

Al-Moussawi accused the defence of making up the testimony and demanded he face criminal charges. “There has been a fabricated attack on the prosecution in the past two days,” he said. “It must be determined who recruited him to fabricate his testimony,” he said.

When chief judge Raouf Abdel-Rahman warned the witness he could be prosecuted if he were lying, Barzan Ibrahim, one of Saddam’s seven co-defendants in the case, stood and chided the judge, telling him he should “be patient”.

“Every session you have a lecture,” Abdel-Rahman snapped, shouting at Ibrahim to sit down.

When Ibrahim argued back, Abdel-Rahman shouted: “Get him out of the court,” and three guards escorted Ibrahim away, one of them holding him by the wrist.

It was the second time that Ibrahim, the former chief of the Mukhabarat intelligence agency, has been thrown out of the court during the trial, which began in October.

Saddam and his co-defendants face possible execution by hanging if convicted on crimes against humanity in the Dujail crackdown, which was sparked by a 1982 assassination attempt on the then-Iraqi leader.

They are accused of arresting hundreds of Dujail families, torturing and killing women and children and killing 148 Shiites who were sentenced to death.

At the start of today’s session, defence lawyers accused one of the prosecution’s first witnesses, Ali al-Haidari, of perjury.

In testimony in December, al-Haidari said he was arrested at the age of 14 in the Dujail sweep and was tortured with electrical shocks and beatings. He also said there was no shooting attack on Saddam in Dujail on July 8, 1982, only celebratory shooting to mark the former Iraqi leader’s visit.

The defence presented a DVD that showed al-Haidari addressing a 2004 ceremony in Dujail and praising the attack on Saddam as an attempt by “sons of Dujail … to kill the greatest tyrant in modern history”.

“He’s … contradicting his testimony,” defence lawyer Ziyad al-Najdawi told the court.

He demanded al-Haidari be investigated for perjury and called for the trial to be halted “to allow for an investigation into the veracity of the other prosecution testimony”.

Abdel-Rahman did not rule on the defence’s request.

The court heard five defence witnesses before adjourning until Monday.

But the session was dominated by the defence arguments against the credibility of the prosecution’s case.

Yesterday, a witness claimed that 23 of the 148 Shiites sentenced to death by Saddam’s regime were still alive and that he had met some of them in Dujail recently.

Abdel-Rahman ordered an investigation into the witness’ claim.

Defence lawyer Mohammed Munib argued today that in light of the witness’ testimony and the perjury claims, the entire discovery process in the case should be re-done and all the prosecution witnesses reviewed.

“What we have seen has affected the basic evidence on which the prosecution has depended,” Munib said. “This is the heart of the issue, and it can’t be avoided or ignored.”

He said that if the investigation uncovered that some of those sentenced to death were still alive, then prosecution documents showing that 148 were killed must have been ”fabricated”.

The documents are seen as the strongest piece of the prosecution’s case.

It has presented a wide array of memos and letters from Saddam’s presidential office and the Mukhabarat intelligence agency with the names of 399 men, women and children imprisoned in the Dujail sweep and the 148 sentenced to death.

The documents showed that some of the 148 were children and that others were tortured to death before they even reached their trials.