icWales: “Saddam given death sentence Nov 5 2006

icWales

Iraq’s High Tribunal today found Saddam Hussein guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to hang for the 1982 killing of 148 Shiites in the city of Dujail. The visibly shaken former leader shouted “God is great”.
Saddam’s half-brother and former intelligence chief Barzan Ibrahim, and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, head of the former Revolutionary Court, were sentenced to join Saddam on the gallows for the Dujail killings after an unsuccessful assassination attempt during a Saddam visit to the city 35 miles north of Baghdad.
Clashes immediately broke out in north Baghdad’s heavily Sunni Azamiyah district where police were battling men with machine guns. At least seven mortar shells slammed to earth around the Abu Hanifa mosque, the holiest Sunni shrine in the capital. There was no immediate word on casualties.
Celebratory gunfire rang out elsewhere in Baghdad, and the people in Sadr City, the capital’s Shiite slum, celebrated in the streets, calling out “Where are you Saddam? We want to fight you.”
A jubilant crow of young men carried pictures of radical anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and handed out candy to children.
In Tikrit, Saddam’s hometown, 1,000 people defied the curfew and carried pictures of the city’s favourite son through the streets.
Some declared the court a product of the US “occupation forces” and decried the verdict.
“By our souls, by our blood we sacrifice for you Saddam” and “Saddam your name shakes America.”
People were celebrating in the streets of Dujail, a Tigris River city of 84,000, as the verdict was read. They burned pictures of their former tormentor.”