Witness tells of brother's execution in Iraq's Aziz trialBAGHDAD - An Iraqi trader told a Baghdad court how his businessman brother was executed in 1992 when former deputy premier Tareq Aziz was in Saddam Hussein's regime, as witness testimony started on Wednesday. Aziz, 72, is on trial along with seven other defendants over the execution in 1992 of 42 Baghdad merchants accused of racketeering while Iraq was under UN sanctions. They could be sentenced to death if convicted.
Jasseb Saber Dhamen said he was spared because he was an amputee, but his brother Karim was rounded up from Jamila market in Baghdad's Sadr City neighbourhood and executed in July 1992. "I pleaded and they released me because I am disabled, but the next day I was told that my brother had been executed," Dhamen told the court when the trial resumed in Baghdad's highly-fortified Green Zone.
Aziz, a former foreign minister and deputy prime minister who surrendered to US forces in April 2003 shortly after the invasion, charges that people who had tried to assassinate him in the past were out to finish the job.
Wednesday's session began with Aziz protesting his Iraqi lawyer was unable to show up because the authorities were trying to arrest him. He already remains without the lawyers he had asked for when the trial opened in April.
In a hearing on Tuesday, Aziz said the trial before the Iraqi High Tribunal was a vendetta against him. "I know it is a plot of personal revenge because the people who are governing Iraq now tried to kill me on the first of April 1980 in front of hundreds of people, but they did not succeed," he told the court. "Now they are saying, "Let us do what we have failed to do in 1980'."
Aziz, the only Christian in Saddam's inner circle, said he was "proud" to have been a member of the now disbanded Baath party but that he could not be held responsible for the charges against him.
Prosecutor Adnan Ali outlined the charges against Aziz and the other defendants, including Ali Hassan al-Majid -- otherwise known as Chemical Ali who has already been sentenced to death for genocide in another case. Majid and former interior minister Watban al-Hassan were among the eight defendants in court.