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Special report: Saddam Hussein's Fate
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Former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein addresses the court during his trial inside the heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad Nov. 7, 2006. Saddam was back in court on Tuesday for the first time since he was sentenced to hang for crimes against humanity, facing separate charges of genocide of the Kurds. (Xinhua/Reuters Photo) Photo Gallery >>> |
BAGHDAD, Nov. 30 (Xinhua) -- The ousted leader Saddam
Hussein Thursday refuted the testimonies of U.S. experts over mass graves of
Kurdish minority during the Operation Anfal in 1987-1988.
Saddam made the refusal when the trial of the former
Iraqi president and his six codefendants on genocide charges against Iraqi
Kurdish minority in 1980s resumed in a Baghdad court.
"These slides of the mass graves is irrelevant to the
Anfal case," Saddam told the court, adding "I refute all the testimonies
submitted by the Americans in this court."
He, however, expressed that experts from countries
out of the U.S.-led coalition, which invaded Iraq, could be accepted for the
court credibility.
On Thursday's session, the court heard a fourth
American forensics expert, Michael Trimble of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
who submitted evidences about how he found the remains of hundreds of Kurdish
women and children in three mass graves in northern and southern Iraq discovered
since march 2003.
He said that in one of his excavations in a mass
grave in northern Nineveh, he found a woman and her baby among bodies of 25women
and 89 children, some of them were blindfolded and were shot with a bullet in
the back of their heads.
Up to 301 corpses were found in the mass graves,
including 183Kurdish children killed during late 1980s, Trimble said. "In all
these graves, 90 percent of the children are less than13 years of age," he said.
Chief Judge Ureibi ordered the trial be adjourned until Monday. If convicted in the trial of Operation Anfal, Saddam could get his second death penalty following the first one he got from the trial of Dujail.

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