BAGHDAD, Iraq – A female witness, testifying Wednesday at Saddam Hussein’s trial, said she was stripped naked in prison, hung by her feet and kicked in the chest by the former Iraqi leader’s half-brother.
The woman provided some of the most gripping testimony so far in the trial, which went ahead despite a boycott by Hussein and four other defendants, who demanded the removal of the chief judge.
Weeping several times during her testimony, the woman described being stripped naked, hung by her hands, beaten and given electric shocks.
Then, she told the court, Barzan Ibrahim – Hussein’s half-brother and the top co-defendant in the trial – told guards to instead hang her from her feet, then he kicked her three times in the chest.
“I told him (Ibrahim), ‘For God’s sake, I’m a woman. Master, I have nothing to confess. Why are you doing this to me?’” said the woman.
The woman was one of five witnesses who took the stand during Wednesday’s 41/2-hour session.
The woman’s testimony directly implicated Ibrahim, Hussein’s one-time head of the Mukhabarat intelligence agency. She recounted her torture at the Mukhabarat’s Baghdad headquarters, where she said she and family members were taken after being arrested in a crackdown following a 1982 assassination attempt against Hussein in the Shiite village of Dujail.
She said she was later taken to Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. One day, she was driven back to the Mukhabarat headquarters for interrogation with her father, when guards threw a dead baby into the car and ordered it taken “to the Mukhabarat garage.”
“What crime have we all committed to go through this agony?” she asked, sobbing.
Chief judge Raouf Abdel-Rahman, who took over last week, pressed ahead with the proceedings Wednesday at a rapid pace, taking advantage of the calm in a courtroom that has been plagued by shouting matches, scuffles and protests since the trial began Oct. 19.
But the boycott by five of the case’s eight defendants and their defense team was likely to further undermine the trial, which has been cast as a key plank in Iraq’s transition from dictatorship to democratic rule.
Hussein and his co-defendants are on trial for the killing of more than 140 Shiites after the 1982 attempt on the former ruler’s life in Dujail, north of Baghdad. They face death by hanging if convicted.
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