Iraq president says Saddam confesses to executions

By Mariam Karouny

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Saddam Hussein has confessed to
carrying out executions and should be hanged “20 times,” his
successor as Iraq’s president said on Tuesday while confirming
that he will not sign a death warrant himself.

“I met the investigator who questioned Saddam,” Jalal
Talabani said in an interview in Iraqiya state television late
on Tuesday. “He said he had extracted important confessions
from Saddam Hussein and he signed them.”

Asked about the confessions, Talabani replied: “About the
crimes he committed: he confessed to al-Anfal and the
executions,” adding that Saddam had said: “The orders were
released by me.”

Al Anfal was a campaign against the Kurds between 1986 and
1989 in which over 100,000 people are said to have been killed
and many villages destroyed.

“Saddam deserves a death sentence 20 times a day because he
tried to assassinate me 20 times,” Talabani said, recalling his
own days as a Kurdish rebel leader fighting the Baghdad
authorities.

It was not clear what details Talabani had of a legal
process that is intended to be separate from Iraqi politics.

“There are 100 reasons to sentence Saddam to death,” he
said, two days after the Shi’ite- and Kurdish-led government
confirmed that the deposed leader will go on trial on October
19, along with several aides, accused of killing 143 Shi’ite
villagers after a failed assassination bid at Dujail in 1982.

Last week, Iraq hanged the first three criminals to be
sentenced to death since Saddam’s overthrow by U.S. forces.

In that case, too, Talabani refused to sign the warrant but
handed responsibility to his Shi’ite vice president, Adel Abdel
Mehdi. He explained his stance by saying that as leader of the
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan he had once signed up his
left-wing party to an international ban on capital punishment.

“My not signing does not mean that I will block the
decision of the court,” Talabani said, while stressing that
political pressure would play no part in the judges’ decision.

LAWYER SAYS DATE UNACCEPTABLE

Saddam’s main lawyer, Khalil al-Dulaimi, complained after
meeting his client on Monday that the October 19 trial date had
not been agreed through the Special Tribunal set up to try
Saddam and his closest associates.

“Setting a date for the trial within days, weeks or months
is unacceptable because the court alleges that it has 36 tonnes
of documents and the defense team cannot come to the trial
without studying what the court has of evidence,” Dulaimi told
Reuters on Monday after he had met Saddam near Baghdad.

It seems likely, however, that Saddam will go on trial on
October 19. The process, for the killings at Dujail, will
therefore start days after a referendum on a new constitution
that the U.S.-backed authorities intend should bury his legacy.

The trial may stir passions among some minority Sunni
Arabs, who dominated Iraq under Saddam and before.

For that reason, the timing of the trial has been
sensitive.

The timing of any conviction and sentencing, and indeed
execution, may be similarly affected by a parliamentary
election due in December. One official involved in the process
forecast the trial would last weeks rather than months.

He also said recently that Saddam might be executed if
convicted only of the killings at Dujail, so that further
trials might never take place.

The Iraqi government, reflecting a popular mood, seems keen
on dispatching the former leader quickly, hence the choice of
the relatively small Dujail case to begin the process.

Prosecutors have said Saddam’s direct responsibility for
the deaths at Dujail may be easier to prove than in larger
cases involving alleged genocide of Shi’ites and Kurds.

The trial, much of which officials have said will probably
be televised, will be held in a specially prepared building
inside the fortified Green Zone government compound on the
Tigris — once Saddam’s presidential palace complex.

(Additional reporting by Alastair Macdonald and Aseel Kami)