Baghdad, Iraq – Saddam Hussein’s date with the executioner could come any day, after an appeals court upheld the deposed Iraqi leader’s death sentence Tuesday, saying he must hang for ordering mass slayings in a Shiite Muslim town in 1982.
The decision, announced at a hastily convened news conference in Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone, could fan surging bloodshed between Iraq’s ascendant Shiite Muslim majority and a disaffected Sunni Arab minority that had long been favored under Hussein. Government and security officials said they were bracing for more violence when the sentence is carried out but insisted that any surge would be short-lived.
Aref Shahin, chief judge of the appeals panel, said there was no further legal recourse for Hussein, and the Iraqi executive is free to send him to the gallows “any day … starting from tomorrow.”
The execution must be carried out within 30 days.
President Jalal Talabani and his two deputies have to sign off on the execution order before it is implemented. Talabani, a Kurd, opposes the death penalty but has in previous cases deputized a vice president to sign on his behalf.
The Iraqi High Tribunal had handed down death sentences against Hussein and two co-defendants Nov. 5 for orchestrating an attack on the Shiite town of Dujayl in the wake of a failed assassination plot against him. Hundreds were detained, tortured and forced out of their homes, and more than 100 men and boys were executed after a summary trial.
Under Iraqi law, the verdicts and sentences automatically went for review before a nine- judge appeals chamber.
The White House called the appeals court ruling a milestone in efforts to replace the rule of a tyrant with the rule of law. But legal experts said the verdict came too soon, just three weeks after defense attorneys filed lengthy appeals on Hussein’s behalf, reinforcing claims the trial was politically tainted.
Some Kurds had also hoped for a delay so Hussein can finish standing trial for a separate 1980s military campaign against the ethnic minority that prosecutors have described as genocide.
“It is not acceptable to finish everything with the Dujayl case and leave 180,000 victims with no trial,” complained Vian Dizayee, a member of the Kurdish parliament in the northern city of Irbil.
The announcement upholding Hussein’s death sentence, which came as dusk fell, did not provoke any immediate outbursts, but tension was high in some predominantly Sunni areas.
“A lot of blood will follow as consequence of this political verdict,” warned Osama Mohammed, 19, a college student in Ramadi, a center of the Sunni-driven insurgency west of Baghdad.
Officials in the Iraqi government have already begun to address the logistics and security measures entailed in an execution, possibly a closed and secret one, according to sources familiar with the preparations.
It remains unclear whether a hanging would be carried out at a preannounced time, with public observers present. Among several proposals before al-Maliki is one that calls for Hussein to be executed in secret as early as next week. His body would then be formally identified by independent observers and the death revealed to the Iraqi public and the rest of the world, according to an official familiar with the proposal. The goal of such an approach would be to reduce retaliatory attacks by Sunnis and other loyalists.
The verdict came amid continuing violence Tuesday, when a string of car bombs and other blasts killed at least 54 Iraqis on Tuesday, including 17 outside Baghdad’s most venerated Sunni mosque, while U.S. troops battled Shiite militiamen in Baghdad.
Seven more American soldiers died, the U.S. military said, pushing the December death toll to 90 in one of the bloodiest months for the American troops in Iraq this year. One hundred five troops were killed in October.
President Bush is weighing whether to send thousands more troops to Iraq, but a senior Democratic senator, Joe Biden, said Tuesday that he would fight such a move.
In the most lethal incident Tuesday, three parked cars exploded one after another in western Baghdad, police and Iraqi media reported. The blasts killed 25 people and wounded 55, one physician said by telephone, as he watched the victims being carried into Yarmouk hospital.
The doctor, who has provided information in the past, spoke on condition of anonymity because of security concerns.
Perhaps the most politically significant attack came in Azamiyah, a Sunni enclave of Iraq’s capital, where a car bomb exploded near the Abu Hanifa mosque, according to Iraqi media.
That blast killed 17 and wounded 35, said a physician at the nearby Nuaman Hospital, who has provided information to The Associated Press in the past. He also asked to remain anonymous out of concern for his safety.
U.S. troops, meanwhile, exchanged fire with Shiite militiamen in east Baghdad, near Sadr City, the stronghold of anti- American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
Elsewhere, Jordanian Prime Minister Marouf al-Bakhit said Tuesday that a former Iraqi Cabinet minister who escaped from a Baghdad prison this month had arrived in Jordan on a U.S. plane. Ayham al-Samaraie, a former minister of electricity with dual U.S. and Iraqi citizenship, was serving time for corruption when he escaped in mid-December.
Lou Fintor, spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, said the U.S. government was not involved in al-Samaraie’s escape “in any way.”
The Washington Post and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
