Taha Yassin Ramadan, Iraq's former vice president, will be hanged on Tuesday for crimes against humanity, Iraqi legal sources have said. The Iraqi governement was reported on Monday to have requested that US officials hand over Ramadan into Iraqi custody ahead of his execution.Badie Aref, a lawyer in the case, said on Monday that he was told about the planned execution by Ramadan's lawyer. "The Americans called Ramadan's lawyer and asked him to be ready as Ramadan was to be hanged tomorrow at 2.30am [2330 GMT]," Aref said.
He said: "They [the US military] also allowed Ramadan to call his family. He was very calm and composed. He asked his family and friends to pray for him and said that he was not afraid of death."
Ramadan was convicted over his role in the killing of 148 Shia Iraqi citizens from the town of Dujail in the 1980s. An appeal court upheld the death sentence against him last week. The killings took place in response to a failed assassination attempt on Saddam Hussein, the former president. Ramadan will be the third aide of Saddam to be hanged for crimes against humanity. Saddam himself was hanged for the Dujail killings on December 30 while Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti and Awad Ahmed al-Bandar were executed on January 15.
Update: he's a deader, as reported by the Guardian. Hanged before dawn. My favorite part:The official, who witnessed the hanging ... said precautions had been taken to prevent a repeat of what happened to Saddam's half brother and co-defendant Barzan Ibrahim, who was inadvertently decapitated on the gallows.To borrow from what one Rantburger said before, sounds like this time, they remembered that the drop table is calculated in feet, not meters. More: Ramadan appeared frightened and said words that indicated he was remorseful, the official said, although he was not more specific.Translation -- "I wuz a rat!" |