Aide Wishes He Had Been Executed With Saddam

One of Saddam Hussein’s top aides wishes he had been executed with the deposed leader, an Iraqi lawyer said yesterday.

Four of the aides are mourning the deposed Iraqi leader’s death while they worry about their own fates as they are held at a US-run detention facility in Baghdad, their lawyer added.

Barzan Ibrahim, Awad Hamed al-Bandar, Taha Yassin Ramadan and Tariq Aziz are “in bad shape, saddened by the news of President Saddam Hussein’s death,” Issam Ghazawi said.

He said he met separately with his clients in their prison cells at an unspecified location in Baghdad last Wednesday.

“They were weeping and they made me cry with them,” he said. “They fear their own fates following the execution of the president.”

Ghazawi, a member of Saddam’s defence team during the last two years, said he has power of attorney from the four Iraqis to follow up on their cases and represent some of them in Iraqi courts.

Ibrahim, Saddam’s half-brother and former intelligence chief, and al- Bandar, former head of Iraq’s Revolutionary Court, were sentenced to death after being found guilty of involvement in the killing of nearly 150 Shiites in the town of Dujail in 1982.

Both were originally scheduled to hang with Saddam December 30. But their execution was delayed until after Islam’s Eid al-Adha holiday, which ended last Wednesday for Iraq’s majority Shiite Muslims.

Ramadan, Saddam’s vice president, was sentenced to life imprisonment in the Dujail case. Aziz is being held without charge.

Al-Bandar told Ghazawi that he “wished to have been executed with President Saddam,” the lawyer said. Ghazawi also told the lawyer that he had been “deprived of the honour of being executed with the president”.

(c) 2007 Birmingham Post; Birmingham (UK). Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.