Saddam's deputy hanged for crimes against humanity
Source: Reuters
(Adds Iraqi government spokesman's comments) By Mariam Karouny BAGHDAD, March 20 (Reuters) - Saddam Hussein's former vice president Taha Yassin Ramadan was hanged for crimes against humanity on Tuesday, the third top aide of the ousted president to go to the gallows since he was executed in December. Ramadan was sentenced in November to life in jail for his role in the killing of 148 Shi'ites in the town of Dujail in the 1980s for which Saddam and two former aides were hanged. But an appeals court recommended he receive the death penalty. "At 3:00 a.m. (2400 GMT) Ramadan was executed in Baghdad in the presence of his lawyer," said government spokesman Ali Dabbagh. "Ramadan did not say anything before he was executed. He was silent." Dabbagh said Ramadan's body would be delivered to his family during the day. The trial court in November found Ramadan guilty of issuing orders for the systematic detention, torture and killing of men, women and children from Dujail after an attempt on Saddam's life in the town in 1982. Saddam was executed at the end of December within days of the sentence being passed, and the other two in January. Ramadan's son Ahmad said his father would be buried in the area of the Iraqi city of Tikrit near Saddam's burial place. "It was not an execution. It was a political assassination," he told Al Jazeera television by telephone from the Yemeni capital Sanaa. BURIAL PLACE A lawyer, who declined to be identified, said Ramadan's burial place had been written in his will. "He wanted to be buried near the president (Saddam)," said the lawyer, adding Ramadan had asked friends to pray for him. Born into a peasant family in the late 1930s, Ramadan worked in a bank before joining the Baath party in 1956 and participating in a 1968 coup that returned it to power. Ramadan was captured in the northern city of Mosul in August 2003 by Iraqi Kurdish fighters and handed over to U.S. forces. In 2002, before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq the following year, Ramadan had proposed Saddam and U.S. President George W. Bush should settle their differences in a duel with weapons of their choice. New York-based Human Rights Watch, which raised concerns about the fairness of the original trial, has said there was a lack of evidence tying Ramadan to the Dujail killings. United Nations human rights chief Louise Arbour, who appealed unsuccessfully to Iraq to stop the executions of Saddam and his two aides, had also urged Baghdad to spare Ramadan's life, saying a death sentence would break international law. In Moscow, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying: "We express our regret over the execution ... and stress once again such actions do not help stabilise the situation in (Iraq)." (Additional reporting by Inal Ersan in Dubai and Olesya Dmitracova in Moscow)
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