Ali Hassan al-Majid is among the last of Saddam’s closest confidants still on trial for crimes committed by the former regime. The verdict met with jubilation across Iraq, highlighting the deep-rooted hatred many Iraqis feel towards the former regime and to Chemical Ali, one of the chief architects of Saddam’s repression.
Families of victims in court cheered when the judge handed down the guilty verdict in a trial for the poison gas attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988 that killed 5,600 people.
“I am so happy today,” said Nazik Tawfiq, 45, a Kurdish woman who said she lost six of her relatives in the attack. She came to the court alone to hear the sentence, and fell to her knees and began to pray upon hearing the verdict. “Now the souls of our victims will rest in peace,” she said.
Al-Majid, whose nickname comes from his role in that attack, has already received three previous death sentences for atrocities committed during Saddam’s rule, particularly in the government’s campaigns against the Shiites and Kurds in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Other officials in Saddam’s regime received jail terms for their roles in the attack following guilty verdicts on charges that included crimes against humanity. Former defence minister Sultan Hashim al-Taie faces 15 years in prison, as does Iraq’s former director of military intelligence, Sabir Azizi al-Douri.
Farhan Mutlaq al-Jubouri, a former top military intelligence official, was sentenced to 10 years.
The killings are a particularly sore point for Iraq’s Kurds. Many people in Halabja still suffer physically from the effects of the nerve and mustard gas that were unleashed on the village at the end of the Iran-Iraq War.
Some survivors feel it was unfair that Saddam was hanged for the killings of Shiites following a 1982 assassination attempt, but did not live to face justice for the Halabja attack.
An estimated 5,600 people were killed in the gassing of the town, which was widely seen as the biggest use of chemical weapons on civilians in history.
The man known as “Chemical Ali” was previously sentenced to hang for his role in a brutal crackdown against the Kurds in the late 1980s, known as the Anfal campaign, that killed hundreds of thousands.